Power Score

As I write this, I am 2 hours away from running my first session of Shadowrun 5th edition. Preparing for this was exceptionally difficult. From my experience, a lot of people are drawn in by the setting, but then when they try to navigate the Shadowrun rulebook, they give up.

I first played Shadowrun in 1991. I had a friend who truly loved the game and ran a few extensive campaigns. Despite playing at least 20 sessions, I never had even a basic understanding of the rules. And I had another more pressing problem - none of the character options interested me. Character options included:

Street Shaman: A wizard with a totem animal that messed with you, or something. At the time I wasn't into spellcasters at all. The appeal of Shadowrun for me was in the guns, car chases and cyber-arms.
Decker: A computer guy who could hack into a virtual reality internet (known as "The Matrix" - this is long before the movie came out).
Rigger: A person who could control drones remotely. I had a friend who made one of these. Her character stayed home and controlled the drone remotely as we went on our adventure. Her drone was destroyed in the first battle, and she literally sat there at the table for the rest of the game, with nothing to do.
Street Samurai: A person with cyberarms, a katana and guns. This was the only appealing option to me.

So what I am trying to say is that despite playing in a few long campaigns, and then running a 6-session campaign in 2000 that crashed and burned due to my inability to master the rules, I am going into this game with a very tentative grasp on what I am doing.

The rules work like this. You roll a bunch of 6-sided dice. You don't add them together. 5's and 6's are successes. Different tasks require a different number of successes.

So, say you want to jump from one rooftop to another. The person running the game decides you need 3 successes to make it. You look at your sheet and figure out how many dice you get, then you roll. If you get at least three 5's or 6's, you make the jump.

Weird, right? I am so used to just rolling a d20. This seems needlessly complicated. But it has a certain charm. The problem is that there are all these modifiers.

For example, when you shoot at someone, first you figure out how many dice you roll. Then you subtract some dice if you are far away. Then you roll. You hit if you get fives or sixes. Your target then rolls a defense roll. If they get as many or more fives and sixes than you, you don't hit.

If you did hit, then the target rolls a pile of d6's and adds their armor score and subtracts the attacker's weapon's "Armor Penetration" stat. Be sure to check your limits, which limit the total number of dice you can roll for different tasks, but only if a skill is involved.

If the defender has more successes than the attacker, the shot still hits. But it does stun damage.

You don't have hit points in this game. You have boxes. There's stun boxes and physical boxes. The more boxes you lose, the less dice you can roll. Once you run out of boxes, you are either unconscious or dying.

This is just way too fiddly and involved for me. I feel like I'm experiencing vertigo, falling into some spiral void full of numbers and phrases stacking modifiers on top of modifiers. My group isn't into rules, they just want fun stuff. But I like the Shadowrun setting so much that I am attempting to hurdle this ridiculous 500 page rulebook to see if we can make it work.

While I tried to figure things out over the past week, one thing that kept me going was listening to a podcast called Critical Glitch. It's a Shadowrun podcast by people who are heavily involved in the game.

There was one episode in particular that I loved. If you have any interest at all in learning more about this game, listen to it here. They talk about the cool stuff they've done in their past campaigns. It's not so much the stories that I liked, it's their depiction of what a Shadowrun campaign can be. It is character-driven. Want to steal a car? That's an adventure. Want to go on a date? That's an adventure. Your enemies plant cranial bombs in your cortex, you fire a gatling gun mounted on a van at a dragon who is swooping down on your city, and you turn into an otter and swim around in the bathtub with your girlfriend. That sounds like a whole lot of fun.

Critical Glitch locked me in and assured me that this game is worth the extra effort. I am envisioning my campaign as a sort of cybered-up Grand Theft Auto. The heroes can free roam the many weird locations (most of which I took from this fantastic Shadowrun New York resource here) and get in to all sorts of trouble.

I was also shocked to see that one of the hosts of Critical Glitch, Steven A. Tinner, passed away a few months ago. He was only 43. Steve knew everything about Shadowrun. He said on the podcast that he had run every single adventure. The more I heard and read about him, the more I admired him. He was a kindred spirit, a dude running tons of games and telling people about them. Heck, he even did a whole episode about one of my favorite RPG topics: Problem Players. I am really glad he did these podcasts, as they helped me immensely and really sold me on the game.

This first session is going to be a pretty straightforward adventure involving the theft of an antidote for a magical STD that a local politician has. I've been going over and over the rules, both for melee combat and ranged. I am focusing on my setting, as I know I will be shaky on the rules but I think running NPCs is definitely a strong suit of mine. So hopefully they will be entertained enough by my goofy voices to overlook any rules awkwardness that may occur.

As of right now, I am secretly hoping that the players like this game enough to go past our agreed-upon 3 sessions. But if this ends up sucking, obviously that all will change.

4 Hours Later: We just finished and it went extremely well. The highlights:

- Infiltrating a lab with stealth, cutting down some guards with katanas and a flash-bang grenade.
- A pretty epic motorcycle chase/gang fight where the gangers rode up alongside our heroes, ready to pound on them with baseball bats... and the heroes pulled out guns and blew them away.
- A fateful showdown with the gang leader, surgically modified to look like Bettie Page with cyberarms. They cut off her arms.
- A party with the wacky politician which involved Habanero soyfuls, novacoke and a healthy dose of jamaican daggering.

They picked up on the rules pretty quick. I am still having a hard time with limits and armor. If a PC is hit they roll their armor and body combined to counter the hits? On these street samurai pregens, that's a total of almost 20 dice! Does the limit of 8 apply there? I assume it does.

I wanted this to be a very low-threat adventure, so we can learn the rules. Nothing worse than trying to hook people on a game only to have them get slaughtered in the first encounter. It worked great.

Overall, we really enjoyed it. I have a lot of reading to do. I hoped to master portions of the game as I go, and slowly roll it out for the players to mess with. I'll keep you posted.

I have run yet another session of Dungeon Crawl Classics tonight at the game store as part of the DCC World Tour program. Not that I want to toot my own horn (at least, not in public) but I am going to go ahead and guess that I have run more World Tour sessions of DCC RPG in 2014 than anyone else on the planet. I believe we just finished session number 18.

My group was shaky for a while, but I was able to stabilize some potential social hazards and now the players are starting to gel just a bit. In the last few weeks, I've embraced the idea of allowing time in the beginning for "maintenance" - rolling up mercurial magic, checking on certain rules, that kind of thing.

Just the other day I got a massive box of swag for free from Goodman Games. The more sessions of public play that you run, the more stuff you get. My box included:

- 7 patches with the face of a bloodied Hugh the Barbarian
- 7 DCC RPG beer cozies - which were extremely popular with my group
- A DCC RPG trucker's cap, given to our youngest player who immediately donned it.
- 7 DCC RPG sticky notepads, distributed evenly
- A DCC lined notepad - for me!
- And my favorite item, a pad of DCC RPG graph paper. That is awesome.

I had declared that some old PCs had gone through a portal to New York City on Earth in the year 1986 (long story). Tonight, a player requested that we do an adventure there. I will cook that up sometime soon. I know for sure that when they go there, they will have to deal with a gang who pull switchblades on them on a subway. Also, there needs to be a dude on roller skates holding a huge boom box on his shoulder somewhere in the adventure.

We picked up where we left off last week. The heroes are in the middle of a module called The Sea Queen Escapes, a fantastic adventure written by the great Michael Curtis. He is fastly becoming my favorite adventure writer of the current era of gaming (my all time favorite is Monte Cook). I especially love Sea Queen because it involves ships. I am always a sucker for campaigns at sea, like the Savage Tide and Skull & Shackles adventure paths.

We are now heading into spoiler territory.

The adventurers had obtained this magic horn from a giant clam. They'd barely survived a fight with a giant hammerhead shark. They rested on their ship, and then blew the horn.

Out of the water came... a turtle the size of an island... WITH A DUNGEON BUILT INTO ITS' SHELL. Sold, right? This is already worth the $10.

The heroes need to get a key out of this dungeon. There's a hatch in the shell and they climb in. This group has a fairly common issue - nobody steps up to lead. I'll say to them, "The hatch drops 10 feet down into a room with fish flopping on the floor. What do you do?"

They all look at each other. Nobody says anything. When I can't take it any more, I have the miniature woman of extraordinary beauty (a wizard's familiar) pipe up a suggestion - use a rope to climb down!

You'd think after 18 sessions this wouldn't still happen. I guess some people are just not comfortable taking a leadership role. Maybe that's why so many people prefer to be a player than to run a game (I hate being a player).

The Sea Cursed People: This room was lined with kelp. Three people were underneath the kelp, cursed to become weird monsters. There was a guy with an eel that could pop out of his torso to attack, a lady covered in crabs (the jokes write themselves) and an elf with poisonous coral on his face.

The heroes were clever and cautious, and avoided being surprised. A sleep spell helped big time, but it was a lengthy battle. Then they saw a door held closed by "golden lobster claw clasps".

The Sea Curse: If this door is opened, the PCs are supposed to make a DC 22 Will save. That's pretty much an impossible feat for most of them. The result if you fail this check: The players hand each other their character sheets. Their characters' minds are switched into other characters' bodies. This can't be cured until the end of the adventure.

This kind of thing is a fun idea, but I had reservations. The players have a hard time with their stats as it is. Handing them some class they've never played before is going to slow things down, big time.

Another issue is that I just resolved some inter-player conflicts, and this situation would likely create new ones.

The module gives another option. A PC turns into a giant crab. Kind of cool.

I decided to talk it over with them and in the end, we just declared that the Sea Curse would simply turn them into kelp-monsters like the crab lady if they stayed in the dungeon too long.

The Jellyfish: I thought this was really awesome. A huge hovering dead jellyfish has treasure inside of it, including the key that they need. If you slice it open, goo sprays out. Those hit by the goo make a save or are paralyzed... forever! Or at least, until they can be magically cured.

Again, our heroes were cautious. They eventually cast a patron spell, summoning a Shield Maiden to slice it open for them. She became paralyzed as the stuff poured out of the jellyfish. The heroes were concerned that she'd die of starvation (not sure if she needs to eat or sleep as she is something of a "warrior spirit"), and hated the idea of lugging her around, as she had been summoned for one week. The new guy had a clever idea. He cast banish on her, sending her back from whence she came.

The adventurers cleared the other side of the turtle dungeon with no problem.

They sailed three days to the island where the mysterious sea queen was imprisoned. The water around the island has tar floating on it, with dead seagulls stuck in the tar. Awesome!

The adventurers are wary of the tar and use magic to cross it. On the island is a building in the shape of an "isosceles trapezoid". Inside is the dungeon that contains the sea queen.

The dungeon has two feet of flammable tarry water on the floor that the adventurers need to wade through.

The Collapsing Room: In here, an earthquake has de-stablized the room. PCs have to carefully move across, or risk rubble falling on them. There's this glowing green capsule in a corner by a weird rock.

One hero decides to cross alone. He makes it. He grabs the capsule, which is 2 feet long. Another hero joins him, and boom - collapse. He's pinned! And worse, the noise has roused a slumbering beast. That weird rock formation by the capsule is actually a giant "adamantor lizard" that has properties of a chameleon!

So we have an epic battle with a tough lizard (it has a very high AC) while rocks fall from the ceiling. The spellcasters critically fail some spells. A cleric accidentally shoots fire out of "a random extremity" cough cough and burns the wizard. The wizard has a clever idea to cast spider climb and topple rubble onto the lizard, but she critically fails and her feet end up stuck to the floor!

Once the lizard was defeated, the store was closing. The players were very happy and some noted to me that the game is much better now that we sorted out our issues.

One player feels that his spell "force manipulation" is "broken". He can throw an apple-sized ball of force that does d6 per level. He just hit level 4. 4d6 is a lot of damage in this game!

He also feels that his cleric's AC is so high and he no longer fears being hit (he has an AC of 19). Most monsters have around a +4 to hit, so I need to roll a 15 to hit him. I didn't worry too much about this comment, because spells will still hit him and I will roll plenty of 15's. Plus, that -8 to swim checks because of the armor keeps biting them in the ass.

Overall it was a very good session and this is a really good adventure. You should definitely check it out.

The new season of Dungeons & Dragons Encounters starts in one month. The last season ended last week. So what should we do for a month? Sit at home?

Of course not! We run White Plume Mountain converted for 5th edition!

White Plume Mountain is one of the classic AD&D adventures from the early days of the game. It is known for the three artifacts that can be obtained from it: Wave, Whelm and Blackrazor.

In this article I am going to use pieces of art from this epic walkthrough map. This whole entry obviously is going to have spoilers for White Plume Mountain, so beware.

I had prepared the adventure earlier in the week. It's very concise, which I love. The dungeon is full of really weird "funhouse" style stuff. Although right now I am really into the cyberpunk game Shadowrun, I was quite excited about running this adventure.

I had run it once before when I was 13, but I butchered it badly. Now is my chance for redemption!

I ended up with 7 players tonight. You just never know who is going to show up at these public games. Sometimes players go on vacation and you never see them again.

There were all sorts of odd events that occurred in and around the store today. A warhammer guy lost his cellphone and thought it had been stolen, and made a bit of a scene in the store. A couple of my players, who were brother and sister, had gotten into an argument on the way to the game and were still having issues as we got underway.

Another player had just gotten back from a vacation to Sweden, which he called the worst trip of his life. He was sullen, to say the least.

Despite all of this.. the game was awesome. If I had to rate this session, I would give it a 9 out of 10. And it was all because of the Frictionless Room.

Our heroes had conquered the Doomvault. They were magically transported back home to Daggerford. After a month of resting and selling off goods, the Duke assembled them. The Duke, after all, owned Lawflame the flaming sword. He was something of a collector of kewl loot.

He tasked the adventurers with retrieving the three artifacts from the wizard Keraptis' dungeon in White Plume Mountain.

Just the description alone of White Plume Mountain is awesome. The entrance to this dungeon is in a cave that alternately spews out steam, and then "inhales" air through a small crack in the cave. The heroes were very, very wary of this whole thing.

They found a secret hatch, and before long they wading through corridors that had foot-deep water covered in algae.

The Sphinx: There's a "mangy and bedraggled" sphinx behind a wall of force. The adventurers can't pass without answering her riddle. The riddle is ridiculously easy, but amusing. The answer to 75% of all riddles: The Moon

The Hot Corridor: This is really cool. There's this long hallway with copper plates on the walls. As you go down the hallway, it heats your metal and starts doing damage. You take damage every ten feet!

Then, once you get into the room beyond, a secret door pops open and 8 ghouls attack. The idea here is that the adventurers will take off their armor and metal and send it down the hallway somehow. Then, when they get to the ghoul room, they are armorless and the ghouls chow down!

Welp, if you've read any of my Dead in Thay reports or my Scourge of the Sword Coast deals, you know that this group generally just plows headfirst into whatever. In this instance, the paladin (in full plate mail!) went down the hallway alone. He's a tiefling, so he didn't take too much damage. Then the ghouls jumped him and the rest of the group had to play catch-up.

This was the rarest of rare instances where the battle was beyond the range of the demi-humans' infravision. How odd that I even remembered that.

The paladin turned most of the ghouls. A mage dimension-doored herself and the rogue in, and the ghouls were taken care of. The ghouls were a little weak for our 9th level heroes, but I decided to leave them, because if a hero had no armor, then these ghouls were going to cause some serious problems.

The Frictionless Room: I don't even know where to start. Pit traps. Frictionless floor, ceiling and walls. In the pits are rusty razor blades. And if you are cut by a blade, make a Con save. Fail and you have SUPER-TETANUS! If someone doesn't cure disease on you, you DIE in 2-5 rounds.

I believe in this edition, cure disease is wrapped into the Lesser Restoration spell.

This room was beyond epic. A rogue jumped a pit and slid around. The others stood on a normal stone ledge and watched. They threw him a rope. But any nudge sent him slowly sliding toward a wall or pit. He fell in a couple times, but did not get the dreaded super-tetanus.

There was tons of shenanigans. The text says that spells like fly, teleport and dimension door don't work in here, but I allowed dimension door because.. well, why not? They needed the help. By the point they used it, we'd already gotten our money's worth out of the room anyway.

Two PCs were on the far side. They tossed an end of a rope to the poor sliding rogue. As he slowly slid into a wall, he tied the ends of the two ropes together, creating one 100 foot long rope.

Heroes on either end of the room held the rope taut. Our rogue grabbed on and went hand over hand, trying to cross the frictionless floor and the super-tetanus razor blade pits. He made it! One by one, our heroes took off their heavy armor and sent it over on the rope. Then they climbed across.

The cleric rolled a one. He fell in a razor blade pit and wasn't getting out any time soon. His real-life sister crossed next. She was above him on the rope. These two players had been in an argument just a little while ago and tensions were still high. She declared that she wasn't sure if she should help him out.

The group urged her on, and in real life her brother asked her to forgive him. Her character wrapped her legs around the rope, turned upside-down and reached her arms toward him. He grabbed her hands. She made a very difficult strength check and pulled him up out of the pit.

Everyone at the table cheered. They both smiled. They climbed to the far side safely. How awesome is D&D?

Everybody crossed except the dwarf, who was holding the end of the rope. He had a difficult task ahead of him. He'd have to jump the pits! He tied the rope around his waist. The heroes on the far side held it tight, so that if he fell into a pit, they could pull and prevent him from falling onto the blades.

He backed up, jumped, slid... and everybody started rolling ones. He fell in the last pit, and our dwarf got super-tetanus!

We had to stop there. What an epic session.

As I left the store and got into my car, a couple was walking across the parking lot. They were around 20 years old and dressed up nicely. I think they came from the sushi place. The guy's... date? Sister? Was loudly admonishing him. She shouted, "If you wanted to leave, then let's just leave!"

He said "Shut the F*** up", and got in the car with her.

There is all this chaos around me, and I feel very lucky to have these games. I go into the store, and everyone wants to talk to me. Tonight, I picked an old player's brain about our Shadowrun campaign from when we were 14 years old. The store manager showed me images of the new Tiamat miniature and told me Shadowrun stories. A new employee told me about her Mummy's Mask campaign, and asked me for advice on DMing and transporting miniatures.

This is the good side of running games in a game store. You feel like a really lucky person when it all works out.

8/21/14: We have finished White Plume Mountain, and it more than lived up to its' reputation as a great adventure. Here are links to the other posts:

Part 2 - Blackrazor

Part 3 - Whelm

Part 4 - Wave

Who doesn't love a bag of holding? It is a magic item in Dungeons & Dragons that can hold tons of stuff for you in a little demi-plane. This allows you to not have to worry about the encumbrance rules (which most people seemed to ignore anyway) or make trip after trip into a dungeon to haul out all the furniture worth hundreds of gold.

As a DM, it can be fun to play that out. The heroes kill a dragon and now they have to transport thousands of tin coins out through fire trap rooms, over a bridge crossing a bottomless pit, and across an ooze lake.

But, yeah, it gets old. You end up hand-waving it. The players feel like you're messing with them. Or, your campaign grinds to a halt for a whole session as the characters deal with the buying of carts and mules, the transporting of loot, and protecting said loot from brigands and ne'er-do-wells. That kind of scenario is definitely worth doing once, but not after every adventure!

Heck, selling the loot can be fun too. Oftentimes, it is that extra side-trip to town to sell off a coral bra or whatever that ends up being a fateful moment for a PC, where our heroes get into a bar fight and the dice rolls go horribly wrong or they insult the local lord and go to war with the whole town.

I guess it depends on the type of game you want to run. If you have a lot of time, then you should definitely indulge in these details when it feels right. If you have a group that can play for 4 hours a week, every week, the go for it. But if you're one of those once a month for 3 hours kind of groups, then you're just never going to get anywhere.

The green illustration is from an enworld thread, and depicts the carrying capacity for 3rd edition bags.

Let's take a look at bags of holding from the various editions. I know there is one extremely awesome side-rule that every DM should know about...

AD&D 1st Edition (and 2nd edition)

This version has different sizes and can hold up to 1500 pounds. The note about it being pierced (from the inside!) is odd. The bag ruptures and is ruined and the contents lost forever in "nilspace". That's pretty nasty!

The second edition version is pretty much identical, except that the rupture could also come from the outside as well.

As a DM I've always been torn on ruining PCs' gear. Say a guy falls into a spiked pit due solely to a bad die roll. There's a good chance the bag of holding would be ruptured. I guess you could say that it is the PC's fault for volunteering to be trap-bait while carrying the bag in the first place, but it seems like a harsh punishment.

I guess it comes down to your style. I assume some DMs out there say that when a dragon breathes fire on a PC, all their stuff burns and some of it is obliterated. If you are one of these guys, make sure your players know in advance. A lot of players might assume that's not something they have to worry about, and would have prepared for the encounter differently had they known their gear was in peril.

The good part about running the game in this more realistic fashion is that the game will feel more real - there are consequences for every action. It will also be bogged down with a lot of pre-planning by the heroes to account for all of the extra variables. They will have to choose what gear to bring, and find a safe place to stash the stuff that they are not taking with them on the trip.

If you check out the portable hole entry, there is a note about placing a bag of holding into a portable hole. Doing so creates a rift that sucks all within 10 feet to a random plane.

Way back when, as a teenager, I was a player in a Greyhawk campaign. Since we were young an occasionally spastic, inter-party combat would break out from time to time. One legendary showdown involved a character who was good at one thing: throwing knives. His opponent was a psionicist who had a power called inertia barrier.

The inertia barrier is an invisible field in front of the PC. Any arrows, sling stones, or knives flying into it lose their inertia and plop to the ground.

So, as you can see, we had ourselves a truly bizarre stalemate. Knife guy threw knives at his foe, which then plopped to the ground. The knife gimmick was all he had. So, knife guy decided that if he was going down, he was taking psionicist guy with him. He put his bag of holding into his portable hole. A rift opened.

We players greedily began chatting about looting our friends' dead bodies and splitting the magic items. I wondered, what plane would they go to?

The DM decided: The Plane of Fire. Both characters, and all their stuff, were incinerated.

D&D 3rd Edition

The 3.5 Dungeon Master's Guide bag of holding entry starts off pretty similar to the previous editions. The bag now has types. And there are rules for putting a living creature inside (something I'd wager has happened in most of your games at one time or another). The creature has 10 minutes of breathable air. Then, they suffocate.

D&D 4th Edition

Not much to the 4e bag. 200 pounds of stuff is pretty crap-tastic. Drawing an action from the bag is a minor.

I'd like some flavor on what the interior is like. Is it a rainbow-mist void? Is it like the interior of a stomach? Is it the interior of a ginormous bag? Is there gravity in there?

D&D 5th Edition

We might as well check out the bag from the new edition while we're here. This version is from the final, borderline-obsolete final playtest packet. This bag holds up to 500 pounds and always weighs 15 pounds. We are back to losing the contents forever if the bag is ruptured, though "an artifact always turns up again somewhere in the world". You still have 10 minutes of air if you climb in.

In this version, putting the bag in a portable hole sucks you into the Astral Plane. And if a hole is put in a bag, you go to a random plane! Nice.

There is a Dungeon Magazine adventure that uses a bag of holding in a fun way. It is called "Deadly Treasure", from issue 41. It was one of those rare modules that I was actually excited about running as I read it.

The adventure was about a wizard's tomb/dungeon where each room was guarded by a magic item in a weird way. "..a party might eventually penetrate his tomb and clean it out, only to discover that they had destroyed half the treasures on the way through".

Room 4 in the dungeon is a narrow crawlway 3 feet wide and high. The end up the hallway leads to the bottom an enlarged bag of holding blocking the exit! "A thick cloth sheet seems to be stretched across the passage before you..."

A PC could get around it. But if they cut it open... some of the PCs are sucked into "...nilspace and quite likely lost forever"..! This actually happened when I ran it. I had a player who was running a custom race he'd made. He was... a klingon. And this was in the horror-themed demi-plane of Ravenloft. Poor klingon was never heard from again. Fun fact: he took 2d8 damage when he ran from battle.

The other big bag of holding thing that springs to mind is the epic "Bag Wars Saga" from the Knights of the Dinner Table comic. If none of your players know about this then, my friend, you have got an epic campaign on your hands.

I don't want to spoil it, but the bag wars saga is built on the conceit that all bags of holding are portals to another world. One party dumped soldiers and materials (most D&D groups will throw anything into their bag of holding, after all). Well, the people thrown into the "bag world" made it their home, stole the PCs' stuff, and an epic campaign was had.

Think about it. You could have your heroes roam bag world, stealing the loot of other adventuring parties (who of course then come looking for them!).

Or, a rival band of NPC adventurers roams bag world and ends up stealing the PCs' loot! The intensity of your campaign just went up about 20 notches. When an NPC steals a PC's hard-earned magic item, that PC turns into the spirit of vengeance and Liam Neeson combined.

I'm not doing it justice. If this even remotely sounds like something that could benefit your game, check out the free 3 page pdf here which describes how "bag zones" work.

You might also want to check out the bag wars book as well. There's a 6 page preview on drivethrustuff here.

I have my second Shadowrun game this Sunday. I have learned more about the rules and have been listening to the Arcology actual play podcasts to help me learn how the game works. I'll let you know how it goes.

In a few weeks, the new D&D Encounters season starts. I got my hands on the DM packet as well as the adventure, so I figured it might be useful to go over the basics.

For those just getting into the game, D&D Encounters is a program where you go to a game store (on a Wednesday - our store runs Encounters on Wednesdays at 6 PM). You go there to play and a DM like me lets you pick a folder full of stuff. I'll hand you a pre-made character if you don't have one with you. If you don't have a DCI card, I'll give one to you. This is to track your participation through the online reporting tool. DCI cards are also used for Magic: The Gathering games.

We are now part of the Adventurer's League. It is broken down into three programs:

D&D Encounters: Where we play the first section of a published adventure over the course of a few months. Once the season ends, we can either continue the adventure or jump into the new season. Or we could do some expeditions.

D&D Expeditions: These are short stand-alone adventures. Check out the list here. I will definitely try to run Jobe Bittman's adventure at some point. He wrote the DCC RPG adventure The One Who Watches From Below, which was fantastic.

D&D Epics: From what I can tell, these are convention-only super-adventures.

The free player's guide is here.

If you are making a character in advance instead of using a pre-made character, you can choose from either of these options when making stats:

- Standard set (15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8)

- Customizing ability scores variant (Player’s Handbook chapter 1)
After assigning ability scores, apply your racial benefits to derive your starting ability score at 1st level. You cannot roll your ability scores.

You'll need to pick a faction. You will be given a folder full of stuff about your faction. This folder can also be used to hold your magic items certificates. Yep, when you get a magic item in the game, you will be handed a certificate for it. Don't lose it!

Factions:

The Harpers: They covertly oppose the abuse of power
The Order of the Gauntlet: Vigilant seekers of justice
The Emerald Enclave: Wilderness people
The Lords' Alliance: Political coalition concerned with security and prosperity
The Zhentarim: An unscrupulous shadow network

Fun Facts About The Adventurer's League:

- You cannot play an evil character.
- You can play an adventure more than once, but you have to use a different character each time.
- You can trade magic items with other players, but you both must have certificates and the items must be of the same rarity. Only items with a "trade log" on them can be traded.
- Arms and armor looted off of slain monsters cannot be sold (the items can be used for that session only, though).
- Players can earn 0 to 2 renown points for their standing in their faction each session.
- There are rules to pay for spells! You can get a 1st level cure wounds spell cast on you for 10 gp. I am really liking this.

- A "first tier" character (aka characters level 1-4) can be raised from the dead for free by their faction. But on exchange, the character forfeits all XP and rewards from that session (even those earned prior to death).

The basic story of this season is that a cult seeks to free Tiamat from her prison in the Nine Hells.

I'm not going to harp on this too much, but Tiamat was killed by my heroes (well, technically they used the arrow of fate to combine Bahamut and Tiamat into the dragon god known as Io to fulfill a character's epic destiny) at the end of the 4th edition Scales of War campaign. And she was not based in hell. I understand that there is no set continuity for the game, and that the Realms has a bit of an altered cosmology. I think in my home game I'm going to have to have the heroes split Io with that primordial's axe to re-form Tiamat and Bahamut just so my game can roll along with the current D&D storylines.

What is kind of cool is if you go and check out the Planescape adventure Fires of Dis, you can actually explore Tiamat's lair in hell (which made me really angry).

There are rules for distributing magic items. Either the group comes to an agreement as to who gets it, or if there are multiple suitors, the PC with the least amount of permanent magic items gets it. If it's a tie, the DM rolls randomly to see who gets it.

Cheating! I am going to just post the whole cheating entry right here in an image. The text advises me to try not to embarrass the cheater. Cocked dice are the main culprit in my sessions, along with the old "I roll when the DM isn't looking - if it is bad I pick it up and roll again when the DM is looking" routine.

There's a whole section on appropriate behavior! You officially can not do a table flip! And wow, I've never run across this: Taking an inappropriate photo of other participants. Creepy! And how do you like this... don't take other people's dice without permission!

The punishments for different behaviors are outlined.

Disruptive Behavior: First, you get a warning. On a second warning, I notify the organizer (in my store, I am the organizer and DM, as far as I know). Get a load of this! If the DM is disruptive, alert the organizer. Wow.

Unsafe Behavior: One warning, then you are gone, you jerk.

Theft and Aggressive Behavior: You are ejected, buddy. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.

Let's take a look at the stuff in my DM folder.

- A table tent that succinctly describes each faction (this is pictured above, where I describe each faction). I've never been that big on factions, though the Neverwinter 4e season did it very well.

- A special certificate that lets me, the DM, get special starting items when I play. I could get 300 gold, or armor, or a bag of holding, or gloves of swimming and climbing. There's a section on page 12 of the .pdf about DM Rewards. Apparently I earn experience points for a character when I run a game! You know what I am going to do? I am going to make a character and never use him in a game and see how high I can get him! Heck, he can already start with a bag of holding, right? Maybe

I'll make up his adventures each week when I write my session report. Maybe I'll have each player make up an encounter for him at the session and I'll make some roll to see how he did. Heck, if any of you readers have any ideas of grueling or comical encounters for this poor sap to go through, let me know. Hmm I think I will base this character on one of the drawings Tony DiTerlizzi did that he posted on twitter recently. More on this soon.

You know me. I hate being a player. I run these public games for two reasons: To meet new players for my home games, and for swag. This is not swag to me. I want dice, minis, poster maps and printed adventures as rewards. I don't want 300 gold!

A real-life gold piece.. now that would be awesome. Stamped with a D&D logo. Somebody do that!

- Tear of Bahamut: I had a hard time taking a good picture of this. Maybe I'm being too dainty, but I don't want to take this out of its' sealed package until the season starts. This is a magic item that can bring a dead person back to life. The most interesting thing here is that it can only be used in a 3 month real-life time period.

It looks like this is given out near the end of this season but can only be used in the next one. That is a fascinating way to try to lock players in, to get them to keep coming back.

- Large stack of magic item certificates: There's all sorts of stuff, including the mighty bag of holding! All that space on the cards and they can't put the description on it? On the back is the trade log. Apparently it can only be traded once or twice.

I am wondering what we do with these when an item is expended? There's a few potions in this pile. Once they are quaffed, do I.. tear up the certificate? Write "void" on it? I feel funny wrecking these things. They could be useful in the future. Maybe they should be destroyed to prevent some cad from snatching them and re-using them illegally. Maybe I should buy a funny rubber stamp or something. Maybe I should burn them!

I was originally going to go over the actual adventure, but it seems smart to save that for a separate column. You're probably semi-conscious at this point as it is. See you later!

Our DCC World Tour 2014 campaign continues to demolish all in its' path, a mighty golden juggernaut gobbling up swag and leaving poor doomed characters in its' wake.

Tonight, we finished up the final battle from The Sea Queen Escapes, did some downtime in Gnatdamp (the town from Gygax Magazine #1), and then went through a level 2 adventure known as The Balance Blade.

The final battle with the Sea Queen was... too hard. The party had 8 PCs. The cleric went down right away from a gigantic magic missile.

In DCC RPG, you roll on a chart when you cast your spell. The higher you roll, the better the effect. So the Sea Queen cast magic missile, rolled high, and thus launched a massive pulse beam of a missile right at the cleric doing 4d12+5 damage! Most characters have about 20 hit points. He was down and dying (he ended up being stabilized).

The players came up with a clever plan, forcing a potion down her throat, causing her and her handmaidens to flee.

The heroes took their white and gold boat home and rested for three months, regaining spellburned stat points, healing wounds, and doing miscellaneous magic things.

One wizard summoned a familiar - a python that wouldn't stop talking telepathically.

The Balance Blade is a short module contained in "The 13th Skull" adventure booklet. It is written by Joseph Goodman, who has written some of my favorite DCC adventures.

When preparing it, I realized that this thing has some issues:

1. It has a save-or-die trap. I thought about it and figured that a character hit by it could burn luck to avoid dying (you can permanently lower your luck score to give yourself a bonus to a roll. So if the PC fails by 5, they can erase 5 points - permanently - from their luck and succeed).

2. The climax of this adventure pits the group's wizard against the party. The wizard picks up the Balance Blade and is forced to do battle with his or her allies. And when it's over, if the wizard isn't dead, the patron sucks the wizard into a vortex that they don't survive.

The adventure says that this scenario is better for a "one-shot". Nuts to that. I rolled up my sleeves and came up with some adjustments. The most popular NPC in this campaign is a wizard's familiar - the miniature woman of extraordinary beauty. I decided that she would be the one to turn against the party (under magical compulsion by the sinister wizard Sezrekan, her master's patron).

I'd have her fight them, and then if they subdued her, Sezrekan would open the vortex and I'd give the PCs a chance to stop her from falling in. If she did fall in, then the next session could be about going on a quest to save her from Sezrekan's clutches!

So, Sezrekan sent his wizard and the other heroes into a cave on a world with a red sky with strange constellations, and in they went.

The Obelisk: There was this crystal monolith with 5 sigils on it. The heroes had no way of knowing that the sigils would disappear as they completed each of the different rooms. It was more of an area to get them to poke and prod. They did do their fair share of poking and prodding.

The Chaos Changeling: They fought a crocodile with stork legs. Each round, its' body changed. I rolled on a chart. By the time they killed it, it had a bear body and a scorpion tail. Awesome monster! Very DCC.

The Gates: There were three gates that needed to be passed through. They had iron bars set close together, close enough that even a halfling could not squeeze through. This was another "poke and prod" scenario. The bars were seemingly impervious to harm. My group was stumped and backtracked, but with a little hinting via the miniature woman of extraordinary beauty, they came back to the gates and eventually realized that each gate's bars could be bent only by a PC of a certain alignment.

In the beginning of this adventure, the DM is warned that the party would need PCs of each of the three different alignments. This group does, so it wasn't an issue.

Trapped Glyphs: There's pair of trapped glyphs under floor dirt in two hallways between the gates. One sends you a million years into the past (for good!) and the other.. kills you. DC 13 FORT save. This was the one I was worried about.

Two PCs stepped on the glyph of annihilation. They both rolled extremely low on their saving throws. The cleric burned Luck to live. But the other guy, a warrior, didn't have enough luck! He was short by one point! He died.

The Succubus: The heroes pass through an illusory wall and are transported to a room with no exits. There is a bed in here and some people. What the PCs see depends on their alignment:

Lawful PCs would see a beautiful lady.
Neutral PCs would see a beautiful lady and her 10 ear old son.
Chaotic PCs would see a succubus and her hideous spider-child.

She said she was trapped here, and could only be freed by the kiss of a "true man". A hero boldly stepped forward to free the nice young lady. She kissed him, and began draining the life out of him (she permanently drew d3 Personality from him per round).

A fight broke out. She used the darkness spell, which is crazy-effective in this game. When you are blind, you have -8 to hit! And because most PCs are human, nobody has infravision!

Worse, even though they were blind, the PCs still would try to fire into melee. The heroes were kicking each others' asses accidentally over and over.

Eventually, they defeated her. Her darkness went away, and her cool effect kicked in: She became oily liquid, which swirled down a non-existent drain, and formed a gaping bottomless pit.

Was the pit really bottomless? Our heroes weren't sure. I swear to you, one PC came incredibly close to jumping in to find out. He probably read my face and thought the better of it. Are you really going to jump into a pit to test if it is bottomless? Crazy.

They eventually climbed down and found a tunnel in the side. The tunnel led to an epic room: A vast hall containing a colossal mummy sitting on an enormous throne. The mummy was as big as you are to a bee.

This would be the one spot in the adventure where we almost had a let-down. The heroes were expecting it to come to life! That would, indeed, be awesome. But it doesn't. It's just a flavor thing. I could have had it come to life and attack, but how the heck would the heroes survive?

When preparing the adventure, I decided to leave the mummy as-is, figuring that the final battle would erase any memories of the mummy.

The Balance Blade: There's a door in the base of the throne that leads to a room - the blade is balanced on the tip of a stone triangle. My heroes were worried about the mummy... so they sent in three "throwaway" characters to get the blade!

The hallway was long. This means that the traitor familiar would have plenty of time to hack in the split party before help could arrive.

They came upon the blade. They did nothing as the miniature woman approached the blade, suddenly grew to the height of a normal woman and grabbed it! Then they saw Sezrekan's visage hovering over her, controlling her, and he of course explained to them how he'd tricked them. He wanted the blade, you see, for purposes pertaining to chaos! (Serious)

I proceeded to roll really, really bad. In the end, she and the blade fell into the vortex.

The wizard who owned her was furious, and is hell-bent on getting her back. That means next week our heroes are going to go up against one of their patrons! I am already plotting it, using material from the DCC book entry on Sezrekan as well as the Sezrekan stuff from the adventure "Tower of the Black Pearl".

Overall, it was a good session. The Balance Blade is a nice short adventure, but you definitely need to know your players before running it. You'll almost certainly need to modify it to suit your style. But hey, you're a DM. Customizing it to fit your game isn't too difficult at all.

I have returned from another successful event at the game store. I am filling the gap in the Dungeons & Dragons Encounters schedule by converting the 1st edition adventure White Plume Mountain to 5th edition.

Last week, our heroes barely survived the frictionless room, with its' pits full of rusty razorblades that gave you super-tetanus! The dwarf was infected. "Where the heck is the cure disease spell", I wondered. I forgot - cure disease is bundled into a 2nd level spell called Lesser Restoration, which also heals blindness and other stuff.

When I got to the store, there were zero players. ZERO. I wondered if maybe this would be the dreaded session where absolutely no-one showed up.

Slowly, they trickled in. They continued to trickle. I had 8 players. Two more popped in just to say hi, they couldn't stay. So, yeah, I breathed a sigh of relief all around.

This group is comprised of the teen-aged "old guard", starring Hack and Slash Guy and Brony. Hack and Slash Guy likes to run up and hack. Brony is usually more focused on eating Wendy's than running his dwarf. Like I've said before, this Encounters game is sort of like running an after-school program.

But now, there is a new faction. There are four people who have.. gasp... read the rules! Printed them out! Leveled their characters beforehand! And they don't want to go into every encounter with guns blazing. Tonight, this new extremist faction openly talked about this situation and actually considered splitting up the party in the dungeon. That would be... amazing.

They didn't do that tonight though. No, all 8 of them went through one of the most iconic D&D rooms in RPG history:

Room 26 - The Terraced Room:

This room is hard to describe, so I have included lots of pictures. The room is terraced, with a series of giant "steps" leading to the center of the room. On each step-level is a different bunch of creatures. A few levels have a glass retaining wall that holds in water. The monsters from top to bottom:

6 Giant Crayfish
6 Giant Scorpions
4 Sea Lions
3 Manticores (wings clipped)

I ran this once as a kid and made a total mockery of it. I didn't know what I was doing. This was my chance to redeem myself!

I was a little worried. Couldn't the PCs just pick off the monsters with ranged attacks? Would this end up a disappointment?

Of course not. Hack and Slash charged, jumped into the water with the six crayfish and began banging his head against a glass wall, trying to shatter it. In the adventure text it is stated that a PC with an 18 strength can break the glass in 2-5 blows. In case you weren't sure, Hack and Slash indeed has an 18 STR.

The cleric jumped in with him. Both of them wear plate armor. Both sunk under the water. It was only ten feet deep, but it was still quite amusing.

The new players fanned out like a swat team, sniping the manticores. The manticores returned fire with their tail spikes. The wizard dropped a pair of fireballs on them and wiped them out.

Hack and Slash shattered the wall and, of course, spilled down the terrace into a pile of scorpions. From here we had a chaotic melee where there was much leap-stabbing.

With the room cleared, the adventurers expertly disarmed a tap and looted a safe. Then, they soldiered on to attempt to acquire an iconic D&D artifact:

Room 26 - Blackrazor:

There's a halfling in here, who is actually an ogre mage in disguise. Why, I don't know. I had him tell them about Blackrazor, and how he wouldn't touch it. This made them paranoid. They literally ended up poking the sword with a stick on two occasions.

The ogre mage revealed his true form. I had statted him out using a lot of the lich stats from Dead In Thay, including legendary actions. The party took him down. The Brony ended up with blackrazor! I did not expect that at all.

You'd think I'd be used to it by now, but I still am shocked by how little we got done. I am not even sure if we will finish this adventure. We still have two artifacts to go.

It was a good session. The group is becoming too large. A split may be in order. If the Adventurer's League draws in new players, we may end up running 2 or 3 tables each week.

My Shadowrun game is rolling along nicely. We had our second session last Sunday. We sort of have the basic rules down and now I am doing a lot of reading, compiling a list of old Shadowrun adventures that are worth running. I am very amused by the idea of running a "retro future-wave" game of Shadowrun, with wristphones and dot matrix printouts.

I am preparing to run Queen Euphoria in a few weeks. I'll also probably run Mercurial, Elven Fire and Dreamchipper. It's funny, the more I read about Shadowrun, the more it feels like a detective kind of game. There's a lot of "legwork" and investigation. It is a fun change of pace. Plus I love roleplaying everyone smoking cigarettes.

After years of playtesting, Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition products are finally hitting the shelves. Today I want to take a look at the first adventure - Horde of the Dragon Queen. The first half of this article is about the authors, the concept of "Downtime", and Adventurers' League stuff. The second half is a brief synopsis and examination of the portion of the adventure that will be used in the D&D Encounters program.

The first thing to notice is the fact that this adventure was "farmed out". Wizards employees did not write this. It was handed off to Kobold Press authors Wolfgang Baur and Steve Winter.

Wolfgang Baur wrote some epic 2nd edition stuff, and was heavily involved in Dungeon Magazine way back when. He was one of my favorites. He did a lot of Planescape stuff, and wrote one of my favorite Al Qadim boxed sets - Secrets of the Lamp.

Steve Winter is a guy who had been involved with D&D for eons. He worked on Star Frontiers, the 1983 World of Greyhawk boxed set, and even the old TSR Marvel Superheroes game. I love the color chart system.

It is fascinating to me that Wizards' new approach is to go to big name "outsiders" to make their adventure stuff. Did they consider having Paizo write an adventure path for 5e? How insanely awesome would that be? Would Wizards of the Coast ask Monte Cook Games to write an adventure? Imagine that - 5e adventures written by Monte Cook and Bruce Cordell. That would be epic.

As for what's inside this thing... There is a section on "downtime" for your character. At the start of a session, players must declare if they are spending any downtime, which is recorded on their logsheet. You can use downtime to craft, practice a profession, recuperate, and train.

Downtime is a new concept for this edition. It is an abstract way to handle stuff the PCs do in town in a simple, swift fashion. You could run this and hand-wave the days in town, or if your players like, you could play it out and you will probably end up with some interesting stuff.

Downtime is discussed on page 68 of the basic rules. Here are the things you can do:

Crafting: If you have artisan tools, you can make one or more items worth up to 5 gold per day, expending raw material worth half of its' value. So, you spend 2.5 gold to make a 5 gold item. You can take days and months to make a single valuable item, like plate mail. It costs 1500 gp, so you'd pay 750 gp and take 300 days to make it.

There are rules on having other people help you with crafting, making the time speed up. Immediately I wonder if it is allowed to have a bunch of NPC allies do it for you. It is things like this that probably caused Shawn Merwin to write this blog post about players who try to "break the game".

Practice a Profession: You can work at a temple or thieves' guild. This allows you to live a modest lifestyle without paying for it. (Lifestyles are a whole other thing - basically, you pay a set cost that covers your characters' living situation and how fancy their home is).

Recuperating: After 3 days of downtime, make a DC 15 CON save. Make it, and you can do one of two things:

1. End an effect that prevents you from gaining hit points. Judging from Dead in Thay, there are a ton of monsters that reduce your maximum hit points. This will probably come up fairly often.

2. Gain advantage on saving throws versus one disease or poison currently affecting you.

Research: This is all pretty much determined by the DM. Each day of research costs you 1 gp.

Train: Learn a language or train with tools. Find an instructor and then spend... 250 days and 250 gold. Wow! I like this, as it makes campaigns take years and years in game, and provides opportunities for the characters to get into hijinks in the city during the months they are spending downtime.

How odd is this: at the end of each "episode" of this adventure, the PCs are awarded 10 downtime days, which "can be spent immediately or saved for later use". So.. some PCs spend 10 days making armor, and others spend none doing nothing?

In the Adventurers League version of this game, XP is tracked individually. PCs do not auto-level at certain parts of the story. One thing that won't go over well is the concept of Maximum XP. PCs have a cap on how much XP they can earn in each episode.

Remember, DMs, you may hear this classic refrain come from your players' lips: "It's not fair". Resist the urge to remind them that they are getting emotional about numbers on a piece of paper in an elaborate game of Cops and Robbers while people all over the world are struggling to find food and a safe place to sleep each day. Do not, under any circumstance, scream at them "Life is not fair!", partly because you will look like a psycho, but mainly because it will not sink in. That's the 20% of your player pool you just have to make the best of.

Now we get into the DM stuff. If you are a player, there's spoilers in here. Don't ruin your own fun. If you want to read about more player stuff, check out my run-down of the player's guide here.

There's these 5 dragon masks. If the bad guys get them all and combine them, they form a single mask that can free Tiamat from Hell. The leaders of the cult are called... uh.. the Wearers of Purple. Like Prince, I guess.

The Cult' and its' dragons are now attacking places to get the masks and to assemble a treasure hoard worthy of Tiamat. That's pretty cool.

Episode 1: Greenest in Flames

The whole adventure starts off with a bang. The heroes are heading to a town called Greenest, which is under attack by a blue dragon and the cult!

Here is where we see just how loose this whole thing is. Basically, we DMs are given "missions" to give the PCs. Some are short, some are long. One session should contain either one long encounter or two short ones.

This is such a radical departure from previous seasons. I kind of wonder if newer DMs will be able to roll with this.

This whole scenario is pretty awesome. The heroes help defend the town and even have to drive off the blue dragon (once it takes 24 damage it flies off - it will probably take down a PC or two before that).

Episode 2: Raiders' Camp

This chapter is only supposed to take 2 or 3 sessions. Our heroes track down the enemy camp and, if possible, recover stolen valuables. The heroes are also asked to rescue an abducted monk.

I am a little concerned here. I am, in theory, supposed to get an entire session out of the heroes coming upon a camp with 8 kobolds and 4 humans. There is tension between the camps, and they eat their meals in separate areas. From what I can see, the idea is that the PCs can deal with each faction separately.

This looks like two quick fights. Though my group does tend to get much less done than I expect, normally.

Once the heroes deal with that encounter and one other one involving the rear guard, our heroes come upon the dragon forces' main camp. Creeping around the enemy camp isn't hard, but if they are recognized, the PCs will be outnumbered. There's about 180 cultists there total.. not exactly a place that the adventurers can just attack (I am dreading/excited about what Hack and Slash Guy will do here).

The camp is pretty cool. I think wizards is doing a great job delivering interesting, "pure" fantasy scenarios for their published adventures. Nothing too out there, just classic fleshed-out fantasy tropes.

Episode 3: Dragon Hatchery

What player doesn't love dragon eggs? The adventurers return to the camp. Most of the army has moved on, but a few enemies remain. They can explore a dragon hatchery in a cave populated with some of my least favorite monsters - stirges and troglodytes. Stirges suck! Pun intended. But seriously... they're lame.

The more I read this, the more I am thinking I will just run it freely and let the players accomplish whatever they can in the 2 hour time frame. I plan on continuing through the rest of Horde of the Dragon Queen at the end of the season, so what's the difference?

Although, I imagine that means we won't have item certificates and it won't be as "official". Maybe I'll ask the group if they want to keep going, or if they want to jump into whatever scenario is next for D&D Encounters.

There are some cool traps in this place. The eggs are black dragon eggs. "If an egg is simply cracked open, the infant dragon struggles for breath, cries and squirms like a human baby for a few minutes, and then dies." That's, uhh... let's just back away slowly and close the door on that little scenario.

The whole thing is pretty awesome. I like that the first adventure for the new edition features dragons, as well as a dungeon. Tiamat is one of the most awesome D&D villains. Overall, it feels like they are getting off on the right foot.

The mind flayer, also known as an "illithid", is one of the coolest, most "D&D" monsters out there. They have tentacle heads, they have psychic powers, and they eat brains. In most games, when the heroes run into a mind flayer, the players break into a sweat. They are powerful, dangerous, disgusting... and weird.

We are going to go over the mind flayer of each edition, and then look at a few products and articles that can help give you a feel for how mind flayers can be used in your game. There is so much material on them that I can only highlight what I feel is the best and most interesting stuff out there.

I do these articles because as a DM, it is time-consuming to do this research. There is so much cool stuff spread over so many editions that can make your game better. I like to try to collect it all into one concise document so that you can get the most out of the creature. There is nothing worse than when you've run a campaign using some monster and when it's all over you stumble on a sourcebook that would have made it five times better.

Out of everything, the one product I would suggest that you check out is The Illithiad. That book is brimming over with creativity, and somehow it has been completely overlooked in the D&D community.

AD&D 1st Edition

- They detest sunlight
- They consider "humanity" to be cattle
- If it hits you with a tentacle attack, it reaches your brain in d4 rounds and... you die. Then it eats your brain. Good gawd.
- They can dominate you magically.
- "It is also rumored that these monsters have a city somewhere deep beneath the earth."
- They have mind blast, but it is not detailed. I guess mind blast was one of the 1e psionic powers in the player's handbook. I believe Gary Gygax would later state that he regretted putting psionics in the PH, because they were not fully developed.
- There is this odd little cartoon of a mind blast..

AD&D 2nd Edition

- This mind flayer is drawn by the great Tony DiTerlizzi. It's probably not the definitive take on the monster, but it's pretty good.
- This monster has 90% magic resistance. NINETY PERCENT.
- In this version, mind flayers have no spoken language. They communicate telepathically which is accompanied by "hissing".
- Mind Blast: A 20 foot cone that stuns you for 3d4 rounds. It then will try to grab a stunned victim and run of with them.
- This version can plane shift and charm, and there's a few different ways for it to extract a brain in d4 rounds.
- Each illithid has 2 charmed slaves.
- Mind Flayer communities are run by elder brains, a pool of briny fluid that contains the brains of the city's dead mind flayers. It has a telepathic range of 2-5 miles, and can warn mind flayers of the presence of thinking creatures. Your heroes are doomed if they think they can sneak up on one of these places.
- They spend their days arguing about the best ways to conquer the Underdark, and they inflict pain on their captives for amusement.
- They spend their first 10 years of life as tadpoles, and live to the age of about 125.
- Illithids are hermaphroditic. They produce two tadpoles in their lives.
- They have a suite of psionic powers from the 2e Complete Psionics Handbook. Fun Fact: The name of this blog comes from that book. A "power score" is when you roll exactly the number you need when using a psionic power. It's like a critical hit.

D&D 3rd Edition

- While it is not my favorite, the artistic depiction of the mind flayer in this book is pretty much their iconic, fully-realized look. Black robes, skulls, and a big villainous collar. There is also a Wayne Reynolds painting of a mind flayer sorcerer which is beyond awesome (I couldn't squeeze it into this article, which is already overloaded with art).
- They are completely self-serving, and will think nothing of deserting their allies in the face of danger.
- Mind blast still stuns for 3d4 rounds.
- It uses the complicated grapple rules for each tentacle. Once all four tentacles are grappling the target, the brain can be extracted.
- They have a handy section on tactics. Here's how they suggest that a mind flayer fight go down:
Round 1: Mind Blast
Round 2: Charm a non-stunned foe (I guess the flayer could either run off with the charmed one, or have the charmed guy stab his or her fallen comrades!)
Round 3: Order charmed foes to protect you. Or plane shift away (Can you plane shift while carrying a stunned foe?! Man...)
Round 4: Eat Brains

D&D 4th Edition

- In this edition, it is explicitly stated that mind flayers come from the Far Realm.
- Mind Blast dazes enemies, and mind flayers are invisible to dazed creatures. Yikes. Of course, invisible in 4e is tricky. Depending on your DM, invisibility is basically just a -5 to hit and no line of sight.
- The "bore into brain" power does 3d6+5 damage and dazes. If the target drops to 0 HP, the brain is eaten. This is amusing because doing 3d6+5 damage to a 12th level PC isn't exactly going to drop them to 0 HP in a few rounds. I should probably look at the Monster Vault version of this monster...

(OK, here is the Monster Vault version....)
- They re-use the 3.5 art. It's a pretty definitive depiction, but it still rubs me the wrong way when they re-use art like this (unless it is truly epic).
- Mind flayers are attempting to create the perfect slave race.

- "Mind flayers use other creatures to reproduce. They implant a juvenile illithid inside a victim's skull, where the tadpole-shaped offspring eats the creature's brain". Yeearrgggh. The pic to the right from Lords of Madness gives me the heebie jeebies.
- Mind Blast still dazes, but dominates on a critical.
- They can burn an action point to potentially get this combination off in one round: Tentacles attack does 3d6+5 and grabs. Then, Manipulate Brain does 4d6+10 and stuns the target!
- It also has powers over thralls. It can use a minor action to make a thrall attack. It can teleport a thrall when it is about to be hit with a melee attack.
- There's other mind flayer monsters in each book, I'm just giving you the lowest level "baseline" version. Otherwise we'd be here all day.
- It says the ultimate goal of the mind flayers is to take over all of the planes and reshape them in the Far Realm's image.

D&D 5th Edition (Well... final playtest version)

- As of this writing, the Monster Manual isn't out yet. So, we'll take a look at the version of the mindflayer in the final playtest packet.
- It seems a bit weak at first glance: AC 13, 44 HP.
- It has advantage on saves vs magic, and can use telepathy within 100 feet. It can auto-sense the thoughts of intelligent creatures within 100 feet. That's pretty cool.
- Mind Blast: 60 foot cone, fail your save means that you take 13 damage and you're stunned for one minute! That's more like it. You get a save at the end of each of your rounds to shake it off.
- It can grapple with its' tentacle attack, and then can extract brain with a +7 to hit. Hit: It devours your brain. Wow.

The whole brain-eating thing is so gruesome. It's very 80's horror. It really sets the mind flayers apart from other creatures.

Dragon Magazine #78 - Ecology of the Mindflayer

I hate the ecologies written in short story form. I'm going to try and wade through this thing. Here's the details gleaned:

- Mind flayers wander the planes.
- Bright light overwhelms their visual nerves and leaves them in agony - it can't even use psionic powers. It is helpless. Yeah, I don't know if you want to implement this. One light spell will nullify your mind flayer encounter.
- The illithid cities don't generally have stairs, because they can levitate.
- Their cities are lit by patches of glowing spores. Their guardian creatures include wererats, beholders and grimlocks - creatures they wouldn't eat.

This article wasn't so bad, though not especially useful. The story is about a githyanki telling a party of heroes about mindflayers. Once the PCs mention the githzerai, the githyanki flips out and tries to kill them.

We should probably talk about them a bit. Basically, the gith forerunners were this slave race of the mind flayers. They revolted and escaped. their leader, Gith, wanted to wage an Eternal Crusade against the mind flayers. Some members of the gith race wanted nothing to do with this and left. The dissenters evolved into githzerai. The crusaders evolved into githyanki.

Githyanki: Warriors who live in the astral plane, originally led by a woman known as Gith. Gith's soul has, I believe, been trapped in hell and is one of Dispater's prize possessions. The githyanki are ruled by a lich-queen named Vlaakith. The githyanki scour the planes, hunting illithid.

Githzerai: Kung fu monks who worship their ancestor Zerthimon.

The githyanki had an alliance with red dragons. This pact was shattered in the 4e Scales of War adventure path, but I'm not sure if that is going to stick or not. So basically, you can have githyanki riding red dragons in the astral plane if you want.

The other enemy of the illithid is the drow, obviously. They fight over underdark real estate. Plus, brains.

Dragon Magazine #150 - The Sunset World

This is another short story sort-of article about mind flayers. Some guy who travels the planes is giving a talk on mindflayers. It is pretty dry. Here is an excerpt:

"Our Monzari guides brought two lean, doglike creatures they called szarkel. The szarkel are imposing and graceful beasts, but difficult to control; we found them to be a great hindrance and nuisance. We will present you with a short monograph on the breed and its affinities; I recommend that you attend that meeting, for reasons that will become clear."

Yes, please, by all means send me a monograph about the szarkel.

- The Sunset World is also known as Ssirik Akuar. I get the impression the planet doesn't rotate. The dim, red sun doesn't cross the sky. It just gets smaller and bigger over the course of 20 weeks.
- The Sunset World has lots of oozes and fungi.
- It is explained that when a mind flayer's tentacles wrap around your head, a sub-tentacle detaches and burrow into your skull. once it touches the brain, it causes instant death. Some of the illithid's mouth parts serve as bonesaws.
- The illithids have a slave-race that are like baboons.

Not much there. Lots of pages though.

AD&D 2nd Edition Ravenloft - Thoughts of Darkness

In second edition, there was a Ravenloft adventure that was all about... mind flayer vampires! I ran it, and it was so difficult that my group fled after the very first encounter. The PCs were super-powerful, but I had underestimated these monsters in a major way.

The elder brain in this adventure recruited the aid of a descendant of Strahd - her name is Lyssa Von Zarovich.

Here's how you make an illithid vampire: Take some dude, insert a mind flayer egg into him, then have a vampire bite him. The mindflayer egg grows and explodes out, and you got yourself a vampire mind flayer tadpole.

- Vampire illithid are wildly insane and uncontrollable.

AD&D 2nd Edition - The Illithiad

I mentioned this briefly in my article about The Best Adventures of All Time. In that, I discussed the mind flayer trilogy by Bruce Cordell. The Illithiad is also by Bruce Cordell, and contains an astonishing amount of ideas and material for illithids.

- Ceremorphosis: When you stick an illithid tadpole in a helpless humanoid's ear, and it burrow into their brain, eats it and melds with it. The body slowly transforms into that of a mindflayer. Only certain humanoid races are acceptable for this process, such as humans, elves, orcs, etc. Halflings, dwarves, and giants (!) are not.

- Collapse Time: This is a psionic power some mind flayers have. They can crystallize time, forming a dollop of thick material called quintessence. Stuff coated in quintessence is protected from the ravages of time.

- Imprint Psionic Circuitry: Some mind flayers have this power, where they can imprint items or people with "psionic circuitry". The circuitry can store psionic energy (PSPs in 2nd edition), create dimensional portals, etc.

Illithids sometimes imprint psionic seals on objects or people. They have all sorts of effects, like allowing you to heal 2d10 hit points once per day, reflecting a spell back on its' caster (!) once per week, or acting as a skeleton key once per day.

- The God of the Illithids: Ilsensine, a giant green brain. It has a trusty sidekick/exarch named Lugribossk.

- The Elder Concord: Each illithid community is ruled by a collection of mind flayers, who belong to the different creeds (factions).

- The Creeds: Mind Flayers are members of different factions. These are:
The Creatives: They make psionic/magic items.
Tha Awaiters: Long-term schemers. Believe that Law guides Chaos.
The Possessors: They want to acquire wealth.
The Tamers: Warrior illithids.
The Thorough Biters: They believe that learning new concepts only occurs through failure.
The Nourishers: These are almost thrall-sympathizers. They take care of thralls and make sure they are not "taken for granted".

The Abysmal: They believe in making sure other races regard illithids with terror and disgust.
The Influencers: Unearth secrets
The Darkeners: They are always looking for ways to extinguish suns.
The Gatherers: They want to combine the scattered illithid communities.
The Arisers: They wants to dominate the surface world in spite of the sunlight.
The Venerators: Priests of Ilsensine.

Qualith: Their written language. It's sort of like braille, with lines instead of dots. They run their four tentacles over the lines to read.

There's tons more, including magic items, a complete illithid community, and stats for all sorts of creatures, including cranium rats and brain golems. In my opinion, this is the book you need to get the most out of mind flayers and really use them well in your campaign.

D&D 3rd Edition - Lords of Madness: The Book of Aberrations

This 3.5 book details certain creatures extensively, including aboleths, beholders and mind flayers. The mind flayer section kind of rehashes a lot of information from earlier editions. There is some nice art and a few nuggets of wisdom.

- Elder Brains can make brain golems out of the brains of intelligent creatures and "an extruded portion of its' own mass". They often serve as an elder brain's physical "hands". Mind flayers regard them with awe.

- The book has a very detailed mind flayer city, called Lagurno, and a fully-fleshed out mind flayer lair. Both of these are basically entire adventures for you to use.

AD&D 1st Edition - Expedition to the Barrier Peaks

I feel the need to include this as well. This is an adventure where your heroes come across... a crashed spaceship. You could access different parts of the ship through the use of colored cards. One creature on this ship is a mind flayer.

You, the DM, are going to have to figure out how you want to portray the mind flayers in your game. Are they from the mad Far Realm? Do they travel the planes, enslaving and devouring worlds? Do they fly through space on magic spelljammer ships? Or are they a technological space race?

That would be the one drawback to The Illithiad. Some of the items in there might be too "sci fi" for some DMs and players. All I can say is, don't let it scare you off. Use what feels right and change or ignore what you don't like. There is a mountain of great material here. Make it your own!

And don't forget to check out this goofy cartoon.

The DCC RPG 2014 World Tour shows no sign of stopping here in my game store. But it is getting a little stuffy in there..

Apparently there is some new Magic: The Gathering thing going on. There's some real life plastic axe you can win..? There's a metric ton of humanity packed into the game store as a result.

On top of that, the Pokemon CCG has somehow surged in popularity and they are also running tournaments.

The result is that it is really loud and crowded - not at all an ideal place to be when trying to run a tabletop RPG.

Our heroes lost their favorite NPC last week - captured by Sezrekan the Mad. This week they went to save her. I knew that The 13th Skull was an adventure about rescuing a Duke's daughter, and it was mere child's play to replace the daughter with our miniature woman of extraordinary beauty.

I made up some story about how the villain of this adventure told Sezrekan the location of the Balance Blade in exchange for the miniature woman. With the miniature woman, he could complete a ritual. Her skull - the 13th skull - is the last one needed.

The adventurers tracked down the entrance to the dungeon in some ancient city ruins. In they went...

The Sepulcher: This is a pretty epic room. there's 13 coffins, alcoves full of bones, and tomb shadows. The tomb shadows are an old-timey kind of monster that just can't be hurt by physical attacks. You have to hit them with a spell or try to turn them.

Basically, you look down at your shadow in the torchlight and see that you have two other shadows that aren't behaving at all like your normal shadow. The shadows begin sapping your strength stat, one point per round!

The heroes got a bit panicky and critically failed some spell checks, but finally repelled them with a spell.

They found a secret stairwell in the 13th coffin that lead them down to a vast cavern with a river, a huge column, a hole to hell (!) and some other stuff.

The Stinking Pit of Hell: In the river is a.. hole. It emits noxious gas. Every half-hour, different types of devils come out. It's kind of left up to the DM's discretion. They offer three types of DCC-weird devils, like worms with legs that end in hands, flying black toadstools, and 4-eyes and 4-legged devils that shoot lasers.

I was wondering if the adventurers would jump into the pit. It leads to hell. We're kind of on our own at that point, but I figured I'd read up so much on D&D Hell that I could handle it if it came to it.

They left the stinking it alone.

The River: Every single session, this group comes across a body of water. Every single time, they jump in, forgetting that their plate mail gives them a -8 to their swim checks, almost guaranteeing that they sink right to the bottom!

I couldn't believe it, but it would have happened again if I hadn't given them a reminder. On top of that, the river had a strong current which could send them plunging down a waterfall into a chasm, likely never to be seen again.

Thankfully they took their time and crossed safely.

The Book of Planes: The heroes headed into a hallway that brought them to an awesome room. Here's the deal. There's a 300 pound book of metal. Each page can take you to a different plane - if someone has built a statue to create a guardian for that plane. There are two statues. Did our heroes turn a page and travel to another plane? Of course they dif!

They appeared in the Plane of Water. They left quickly. It's too bad. They appear on an island, and a talking wave is supposed to come up and angrily ask them if there is any news for "The Water Lords". Then, when their answer doesn't satisfy the wave, a dozen more waves show up. Maybe the heroes will go back there some time.

The heroes turned to the other active page... and they went to "The 417th Level of Hell". It's so hot that you take a point of damage each round. There, in hell, a barbed devil had the miniature woman of extraordinary beauty tied up. It was going to sacrifice her.

Well - it would have, if not for a good roll on a magic missile spell that fired one massive plasma beam for 4d12+4 damage! The devil was dead in one shot.

She was rescued. The heroes left the dungeon (they never actually battled the Silver Skull), carrying this 300 pound book with them.

They made plans. They are going to renovate the fortress near their town (the keep from Sailors on the Starless Sea... you know, the one with the well of souls and the huge misty hole in the ground). They are going to place the Book of Planes there, and build some statues (one old PC in town is a dwarven stonecarver, as fate would have it). They want to make portals.

This will work out well. They can make a portal to The Court of Chaos. They will learn that Sezrekan traded the Balance Blade to the court in exchange for a bunch of stuff.

Next week, our heroes are going to go and oppose their old enemies in the court and try to steal the Balance Blade right from under their nose.

It was an OK session. It ran short, and it was very noisy in the store. I'd give it a 7 out of 10.

The adventure is pretty good. I like the Joseph Goodman ones. He puts in some really creative and inspiring stuff. The Book of Planes is a great addition to the campaign.

I hear that Wizards of the Coast has put up the basic rules for Dungeon Masters. Seeing how this is a blog by a Dungeon Master for Dungeon Masters, I think we need to probe it thoroughly.

They also updated the players' basic rules pdf. That was fast. They added a few spells, a background, the Forgotten Realms gods and the five factions in the Adventurers' League.

The list of the gods takes up an entire page. I'd prefer a small list, as most players aren't going to remember more than 3 of them anyway. I understand that the Realms has a massive pantheon so I guess this shouldn't be so shocking.

I really like the little silhouettes they put on the character sheets. It's not a full-fledged piece of art like a Dungeon Crawl Classics character sheet, but it is a cool touch.

All right, enough of that player stuff. Let's check out the Dungeons & Dragons DM Basic Rules. It is completely free, found right here.

The thing jumps right into discussion about monsters. Monster hit points is partly determined by size, which is in this table here called "Hit Dice by Size". A gargantuan creature gets d20 hit points per hit die! That is crazy.

I do not like the "average HP per die". Do you really have to put the "1/2" there? Can't we just simplify it? This is the basic rules, strip it down for the love of gawd.

Monsters have Challenge Ratings. A monster with a challenge level 3 is an appropriate challenge for 3rd level characters. The challenge ratings actually go all the way up to level 30.

Looking through the monsters, it appears that 4 zombies are a challenge for level one PCs. A Manticore is a challenge for level 3 PCs. A frost giant is a challenge for level 8 PCs... I'll say. It swings twice with +9 to hit and does 25 damage!

There's a box about one of the most historically headachey rules in RPG history: Grappling. Escape a grapple with Athletics/Acrobatics. The DC will be in the stat block. If it is not, then it is 10+ the monster's STR modifier.

There's these things called Lair Actions. Certain legendary monsters have them. On initiative count 20, the creature can use a lair action option.

I was going to list some examples, but there is only one monster in the entire document with Lair Actions:

Adult Red Dragon: Magma erupts from a point in the ground within 120 feet of the dragon. Make a DEX save or take some hefty damage! That is so awesome, I can't even...

I don't want to list the rest, just in case there are players reading. No sense in spoiling it! But that's the basic idea for Lair Actions. That is a really great idea.

The rest of the document is just monster stats. It's a very simple pdf, not much to it.

The monsters are organized alphabetically. They are not grouped by type, like in some previous editions. In 4e, dragons were all listed under the "Dragons" entry. In this edition, "Adult Red Dragon" is in the letter "A" section. Seems like it might cause confusion. I guess there's pluses and minuses to any way of organizing them.

There are stats for mundane animals, even camels and deer. Dinosaurs are in here, too, under their actual dino-names.

Fun Facts:

- Monsters that can burrow cannot burrow through solid rock.
- You don't have to see someone to communicate with them via telepathy.
- A monster with multi-attack can only make a single melee attack for an opportunity attack.
- Monsters with bows are assumed to have 2d10 arrows with them (I'll just say they have 10.. yeesh)

This is basically a pdf full of monster stats, with an emphasis on basic animals like dogs and elk. Works for me!

I am really happy about this new edition. I hope it is well-received. I guess we will see soon enough.

I am a little mixed-up. I didn't realize that the tyranny of dragons season kicks off next Wednesday. I have been told that next week is supposed to be a character-making week. Is that true?

I hate wasting a session on character building. If I have enough players, I want to run a session. It feels like a waste to spend that time making characters. That can be done at any other time in the week!

I picked up the full hardcover of Hoard of the Dragon Queen. I love the paper they used in the book. It's not shiny like the 4e paper, and sturdier. I don't have to worry about my greasy fingers smearing ink. The paper also somehow makes the color on each page look very... full... if that makes sense.

The store owner had warned me the other day to expect a flood of players. Apparently there is a lot of interest in the upcoming season! I am already over the limit with 8 players, so hopefully we can get some more DMs.

It truly fascinates me that so few people want to be a DM. I sometimes almost feel sorry for the players when I run games. They have to sit there and wait for their turn. How boring. I am constantly active as a DM. I have more than enough to do. People are missing out.

We continued our exploration of White Plume Mountain, a classic 1st edition adventure converted to 5th edition. Last time, they went through the legendary tiered room and then killed an ogre mage. Blackrazor, the soul-sucking sword, was claimed by Brony, who plays a dwarf.

The adventurers doubled back to the sphinx, and headed down the tunnel to the right which ultimately leads to Whelm).

Room 3 - The Green Slime: The hallway has 1-2 feet of water in it. Algae floats on the water. Thus, this makes it impossible for our heroes to see the GREEN SLIME lurking on the floor! What a simple, clever trap.

Brony ended up having his boots and pants burned off. Most of the group wasn't sure what to do, so they did nothing (!). Brony hooked a grappling hooked into the ceiling and climbed the rope. The slime clung to his lower half, but he had pulled it out of the water. This meant that the adventurers could target the slime!

Of course, hitting the slime causes half damage to Brony as well. And even worse, a few arrows missed the slime but hit the Brony! A final devastating swipe from the flaming sword Lawflame destroyed the slime. It was a memorable encounter.

The Flesh Golem Math Puzzle: There are flesh golems with numbers on them. They give you 60 seconds to figure out which one of them doesn't belong. I won't spoil it, but it's a fairly common math question. The paladin figured it out almost immediately, and gained a flesh golem sidekick.

The Boiling Mud Platform Room: This room is a huge cavern. Boiling mud is 50 feet below. If you fall in... you die. Far across the room is a ledge with the exit door. Haning from the ceiling from chains are short wooden discs. Basically, you have to jump from platform to platform to cross the room. To make things worse, geysers of boiling mud shoot into the air every few minutes.

This was beyond epic. The rogue tried to jump from platform to platform. He rolled horribly. He fell into the mud. I ruled that the PCs had one round to save him before he died. More bad rolls happened, as a PC tied a rope to an arrow and shot it toward the rogue... and rolled a one. He rolled again to see if he hit the rogue.. he did. The arrow plunged into the poor rogue, and they pulled him out!

The paladin had an awesome idea. He decided to swing across the room from chain to chain, like Tarzan (or like Shia LeBouf and the CGI monkeys from Indiana Jones for you younger people). He rolled... extremely poorly. He plunged into the mud. A rope-arrow was fired into him, and he was pulled out.

Once a PC came out of the mud, I ruled that they had 0 HP and were dying. The PCs had to administer aid or give them a potion to keep them from perishing.

The party cleric had a spell called Air Walk. This allowed him to walk across the room with no trouble at all.

The group had gotten excited and loud. They had been drowning out the party wizard, who kept trying to tell them that she had spider climb. Finally, she got them to listen. They tied two 50 foot ropes together, and she spider climbed to the far side. The ends of the ropes were tied to convenient stalagmites or whatever. Now they could climb the rope across instead of jumping from platform to platform, right?

Nope! They didn't want to climb. They wanted to use it as a zipline! What a great idea. One by one, using bows or staves, they zipped across the room. The paladin went last. A geyser went off, striking and scalding him. He held on and made it across.

Once it was over, the party realized they probably could have used the bag of holding to make this trip easier. The wizard could have carried them across in the bag one at a time (spider climb lasts for one hour).

This encounter took up the bulk of the session and was one of the greatest things I've done in D&D in years.

The Vampire: In a room full of perpetual darkness was Ctenmiir, the vampire. He charmed a rogue, negotiated a bit, and finally a brawl broke out. Darkness is interesting: The PC has disadvantage to hit, and enemies have advantage to hit him.

The vampire was defeated. His horde was sifted through - behold, the mighty hammer: Whelm! Brony has Blackrazor, which is one of the three artifacts in this adventure. He is a dwarf. Whelm is made for dwarves! It is +5 in the hands of a dwarf.

Brony literally screamed that he wanted it, and an argument broke out at the table. He wanted two artifacts? I explained to him that the whole group needed to come to a consensus. I could see people getting mad.

He rolled the rogue for Whelm. Brony won. He handed Blackrazor to Hack and Slash Guy. Brony has Whelm.

It was a bit of noisy unpleasantness at the end, but I'd still give this session the rare 10 out of 10. This is truly a fun adventure.

I run four role-playing games a week.

Monday: Dungeon Crawl Classics
Wednesday: D&D 5th Edition Adventurer's League
Thursday: D&D 4th Edition
Sunday: Shadowrun 5th edition

Dungeons & Dragons 5e is just rolling out. People on twitter and in my game store are frothing at the mouth over the new Player's Handbook. But all I really care about is Shadowrun.

Why? The Shadowrun 5th Edition rulebook is a jumbled, 500-page mess. The rules are ridiculously complicated.

And yet every session is awesome. We have motorcycle fights. My players pick up babes and dudes in sleazy bars. They meet noir-ish detectives who smoke cigarettes and say things like:

“I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.” (I steal quotes from Raymond Chandler novels)

My runners live with a ridiculous college party girl named Lacey Heels. She stole 40,000 nuyen for them. They went to the dean of her college's house and blackmailed him into giving her all A's without her having to attend classes.

There have been bar fights, motorcycle thefts, motorcycle races, motorcycle explosions, corrupt politicians and a gigantic cyberzombie that nearly killed our orc street samurai. It took him over a week of convalescing to recover from the wounds.

In the last 6 months of our 5e D&D campaign, I have tried to get the campaign to have the "reading-a-novel-and-I-can't-put-it-down" feeling. We instantly had that feeling in the first session of Shadowrun and it shows no signs of slowing down.

The characters are building relationships, the players are invested in the story, and they even care about some of the NPCs. It helps when you luck out and end up with a "superstar" NPC that the PCs can't get enough of. The characters love Lacey Heels and have adopted her meticulously-planned partying lifestyle (She keeps a schedule. Sunday is Cuddle Day, for example. You have to put on your pajamas and cuddle all day).

Here are what I think are the essential things you need to know and do to get a good game of Shadowrun going.

1. Listen to Podcasts

Check out Critical Glitch. Listen to this session of Hiddengrid. It has a combat where you can get the idea of how things work, and it's very funny too. The main thing you will learn is that Shadowrun, despite all of its' hard-to-find rules, is a very loose game. The story is largely in the hands of the players. This game is all about investigations, planning, sneaking and intense shootouts.

2. Know the Basics of Combat. Take Notes in Advance!

It is so hard to find the sample NPCs in the pdf. Do this in advance. Take the enemy stat block and distill it to the core. NPC stats are on page 381 - burn it into your brain! Get a piece of paper, or make a word file to refer to during the game.

This game is all about rolling a certain number of d6's (this game only uses six-sided dice). Each 5 or 6 rolled is counted as one "hit". The more "hits", the better you've done.

If you're using these ganger stats pictured here, mark this down:

Initiative: 6+d6
Attack: (gun) 8 dice, 8 physical damage, -1 Armor Penetration
Defense: 6 dice
Armor: 13 dice

You should know that Attack is Pistols + Agility, Defense is Reaction + Intuition, and Armor is Armor + Body.

That's it. once you have this down, you can run Shadowrun.

Take notes on any items or rules situations that may come up in the session at hand, like the car chase rules or drug stats.

Remember that Initiative is weird. After everyone goes, subtract ten from everyone's initiative total, and pass through again with everyone who still has a positive number for initiative.

3. Read a Shadowrun Novel

I generally do not enjoy fiction. I can binge-read non-fiction like Into the Wild or William Shatner's Star Trek Memories (and I don't even like Star Trek), but I can't force myself to get through most fantasy or sci-fi novels.

So I did some research on Shadowrun forums. The general feeling is that a good book to start with is Into the Shadows, a book full of linked short stories by different authors.

I tried it but couldn't get into it. So I went with plan B. A guy on a message board declared that "Nigel Findley is Shadowrun". Nigel wrote about four Shadowrun novels, and a pile of Shadowrun supplements. I always liked Nigel's D&D Spelljammer stuff. His flavor text that told you how to feel and what you said always amused me, but also grabbed me by how well it flowed.

I tracked down his first Shadowrun novel, 2XS, and I read the whole thing. It is about a private detective who gets mixed up in a too-complicated conspiracy involving a cyber-drug called 2XS. The book is valuable because it gives you a feel for the setting and demonstrates a lot of its' concepts. I especially loved his depiction of what it is like in the Matrix:

"The pitch-black sky is crisscrossed by intermittent beams of light in more colors than have names, each looking solid as steel. The 'ground' is black, too, with the same kind of network of intersecting lines. And scattered throughout the space between are big glowing icons that represent nodes within the Matrix. I could pick out the shapes of the ones nearby-a perfectly mirrored sphere, a ruby-red pyramid, an image of the Space Needle, a pagoda glaring in eye-piercing green-but the ones more distant were just specks of light. Toward the electron horizons, the discrete icons blurred together until they looked like an impressionist cityscape shining into a starless sky."

I also appreciated that our hero was not some trenchcoat badass superdude. He got scared a lot and he ran away quite a bit. Dirk Montgomery was mortal. He didn't have all the answers, but he was determined to find out what happened to his sister. And he'd cozy up to the ice-cold corp babe who was somehow involved, if she'd just stop trying to kill him.

My favorite character in the novel was Buddy, a decker (a person who plugs into The Matrix). She was in her 50's and had a fairly pathetic apartment. All she cared about was The Matrix. Inside The Matrix, she was a beautiful woman in a green gown. Dirk assumed that this was how Buddy used to look, and how she still saw herself. Her "meat body" was merely an inconvenience.

4. Populate Your World with NPCS and Locations

Find out in advance who your players' contacts are (each character has a few NPC friends aka "contacts" who can help them get information or items). Get ideas from them on what their contacts are like. Make a list of interesting people for the PCs to meet. Let your style shine through. You'll need surly gang members, weary bartenders, haughty corporate types, down on their luck homeless dudes, and a buddy with a heart of gold who can get you any illegal weapon for a reasonable price.

Make up a bunch of bars and dance clubs each with a different gimmick. Most Shadowrun games are set in Seattle, so you can dig through the pile of sourcebooks and take or modify locations to suit your taste.

5. Check Out a Published Adventure to Study the Structure

Cyberzombie!

The modules are fun to read. They are not like D&D adventures. This game is all about getting hired, getting double-crossed, and above all else - investigation. Your heroes need to do their legwork or they are in deep trouble. The adventures give you a good feel for how the game can be run, and what things you need to have ready for your scenario to run smoothly. Some of the most well-regarded adventures include Queen Euphoria, Dreamchipper and Mercurial. Remember that these are from an obsolete edition, so you'll have to fix the stats to run them properly (which doesn't take long). They cost a measly four bucks!

6. Know What You Need to Know, Slowly Roll Out the Rest

Find out what your players are running, and read up on all of the relevant rules. Don't worry about the rest. If the party has a spellcaster, read up on magic. If the players are using pregens, look them over and take notes on what you need to know. The pregen sheets are weirdly organized. We have played four sessions and the players still can't find stuff on them.

7. Gear Is a Big Deal

Shadowrun is all about the gear. Guns, cyberware, grenades, security devices and motorcycles are what the game is all about. Know what your players have, and use a few new devices each session, to show your players the cool stuff and to encourage them to use it.

8. Dig Up Inspiring Art to Help You Come Up With Ideas

All you need to do is start on page one of this thread. There is, as of now, 122 pages full of Shadowrun art to use as you will.

9. Know the Healing Rules (Page 205)

Your heroes probably won't get hurt much. But when they do, it is a big deal. Your runners are going to want to have medkits (they give bonuses to your healing dice pool) and the First Aid skill. They get a chance to heal physical damage within the first hour of taking it. Then they roll to heal once per day. This makes sense. I mean, you just got shot. You're likely going to be in bed for a while. Our orc street samurai spent a week of rest and still hadn't fully healed.

Once they have some money, your runners will want to buy Doc Wagon contracts. Doc Wagon is a company that sends ambulances of medical people with guns who will drive into a warzone if necessary to pull you out. If a medical personnel dies during the extraction, you'll be charged an extra 20,000 nuyen.

And remember, a critical glitch on a healing roll is bad. Which is why you...

10. Do Not Forget About Edge!

Edge points can be used to save you, basically. You can spend an edge point to re-roll every die that missed (!), to move to the top of the initiative order, to negate a glitch, and most importantly it can be used to sort of save you from dying.

Steven A. Tinner of Critical Glitch said that Edge was a little secret of the game that can help insure that you don't ever die. Which is nice!

Your bad guys can use Edge, too. They have edge points according to their professional rating. You might want to use this sparingly, or only in "boss fights", until you see how your group fares in combat situations.

Do not let the rulebook dissuade you. Shadowrun is a game worth playing!

A lot of the art in this blog post comes from the epic White Plume Mountain walkthrough map by Mock Man Press. You can buy this as a poster for 20 bucks! It is sort of essential for any true D&D room.

We had more confusion tonight at the game store. I had been previously told that tonight was to be a character-making session for the Adventurers' League. Two weeks ago I told my players we'd wrap up White Plume Mountain tonight, and then I'd go over character making and hand out their faction folders.

In the new season, each player has to join one of five factions. They are given a folder with faction stuff in it, along with a character sheet and other cool stuff.

Somewhere between then and now, the store had decided that not only would this week be a character-making session, but so would next week. But I'd already told my players differently, and three of them were on vacation this week, and would be showing up next week with a fully-made character, expecting to start it off.

Long story short: The season starts next week. We have about 14 players right now, so we'll have two DMs. The store owner will be running the other table.

Before we began, I thoroughly went over the player's guide for the upcoming season with the group. I told them about downtime, and went over - in great detail - the bad behavior section. They were most amused at the concept of table-flipping.

As for tonight, we finished up White Plume Mountain, converted to 5e (the final playtest packet version of 5e). Now that it's done, I can honestly say it is one of the most enjoyable adventures ever made. It is fun from start to finish.

Our heroes had Blackrazor, and they had Whelm. All that was left was Wave, the trident. They regrouped by the mangy sphinx, and headed up the north hallway.

I should probably mention that I forgot to bring the adventure. I prepared this adventure by going through it and writing four pages of notes, so I'd retain everything and have a cheat sheet with everything I needed at a glance. This has for the millionth time paid off, as I was able to run the entire final section of the adventure off of memory and my papers with every little detailed notated.

Room 10. The Kelpies

This room has deep water, where two seaweed-mermaids known as kelpies lurk. They drown-kiss you. They also have a piece of art in the back of the book that depicts them... topless. For the benefit of the younger players, I re-flavored the kiss and neglected to have them ogle the seaweed bewbs.

This room involved a lot of heavy-armor swimming shenanigans, something that's been rampant in my games for the past few months. There was a nice deal of switching out weapons for ones that worked in underwater situations (javelin = good, maul = bad).

The heroes took down the kelpies in a most brutal fashion and looted their underwater cave.

Room 11. The Spinning Hallway

This hallway is like the inside of a tube that spins... and ha slick oil in it. As the party paladin stumbled through it, a slot opened in the door on the far side. An enemy guard fired a flaming arrow, igniting the oil!

What followed was an epic encounter as the bad guys would open the door, attack, then close it. The party had a hard time both getting across the hall, and figuring out how to handle this.

The bad guys are cool, too. There's Burket the "alert guard". And there's his significant other, Snarla, a mage who is also... a werewolf. Why? Why not?! The players minds were blown when she transformed after pelting them with a fireball.

One hero flung his javelin into Burket's chest. Then the dwarf threw Whelm so that it "hammered" the javelin clear through, killing Burket. Snarla howled in sorrow as the paladin had at last made it through the hall and cut her down.

Room 17. The Boiling Lake

This is hard to describe. Check out the picture. There's a giant crab in a sort of force-room inside a lake. The force wall is like a thin skin - it can be pierced. The giant crab guards a treasure chest that indeed contains Wave.

The dwarf decided to use Whelm's shockwave power, even though it would hurt his friends. He slammed his hammer on the ground, letting out a wave of energy that injured the crab, his friends.. and the walls. The wall began to burst. Water shot out from multiple apertures.

The encounter became about snatching wave before the whole lake crashed down on them. The crab grabbing them in his mighty pincers didn't help, either.

But they dropped the crab and escaped in the nick of time. Our heroes had completed one of the classic adventures of all time.

A running joke about White Plume Mountain is how the heroes always kept the artifacts instead of handing them over to their benefactor. In this case, it was the Duke of Daggerford.

Well, guess what? This group, who snatched Lawflame from the Duke's grasp and fight over possession of every little item, handed over all three artifacts to the Duke in a unanimous decision. I was blown away.

I can't say enough good things about this adventure. It is fantastic and hilarious.

The group is really fired up for Horde of the Dragon Queen. I will have a full report for you next week.

This article is about two sessions of DCC RPG: One was pretty bad, and one was really good.

I had an odd couple of weeks when it came to Dungeon Crawl Classics. As I've mentioned in other posts, right now I am very into Shadowrun and less into fantasy RPGs.

It is funny how this works. Often you may find that by the time you get something you are passionate about up and running that your interests have shifted to something else.

A few years ago, I was hellbent on running a D&D Castle Greyhawk campaign. Castle Greyhawk is what Gary Gygax ran when playtesting Dungeons and Dragons in the 70's. It has never been published in its'"true" original form.

There's been a slew of related products though, like the parody Castle Greyhawk, the attached demi-plane adventures (Land Beyond the Magic Mirror, Isle of the Ape, and Robert Kuntz's Bottle City to name a few), TSR and Wizards made stuff like Ruins of Greyhawk and Expedition to Castle Greyhawk. Gygax himself started working on publishing the "real" castle with the serial numbers filed off, called Castle Zagyg.

I decided to try and create a Castle Greyhawk using the best stuff from all of this material. I dug up every article and message board post I could find by Gygax and his old players that had details of the original dungeon to help me craft an authentic and exciting version of the dungeon.

There was already a version of Castle Greyhawk published that tried to be as close to Gary's vision as humanly possible. It was called Castle of the Mad Archmage. I used that as the basis for my version.

But the more I looked through that dungeon, the more I realized that while I would like to play in it, none of my players would. They're not big on heading in and out of dungeons. They really don't like empty rooms, which Castle Greyhawk had many of. We didn't do much mapping, which was a big part of the Castle Greyhawk experience.

While I enjoyed reading about the adventures of Lord Robilar and Tenser, and discovering Gary's short story about a sub-level called "The Black Reservoir", I realized that for my players, Castle Greyhawk would be... boring.

So I set out to make a dungeon inspired by Castle Greyhawk that would entertain them. I dug up elaborate trap rooms from any source I could find, all epic, creative and deadly. I made two dungeon levels full of traps, with little in relation to the actual Castle itself. Slowly, my enthusiasm waned. I lost the spark of inspiration, and realized that not only was I working on something that was barely Castle Greyhawk, but I had also burned out on it before I'd even ever run it.

It is with all those words that I try to tell you that right now, Shadowrun rules my brain, and DCC RPG was suffering because of it. Last week's session was the low point. I ran Doom of the Savage Kings, a 1st-level adventure.

I re-purposed the dungeon, placing it in the dimension of the Court of Chaos. Our heroes had decided to go get the balance blade from the Court, who were planning to use it to sway the balance between Law and Chaos.

I never used Doom of the Savage Kings because I just didn't like it much. It's not terrible. The premise is interesting - a hideous monster is attacking a town called Hirot, and the heroes need to go get an item to help them defeat it. I didn't like the town, Hirot. I didn't like the monster. And I didn't like the kind of nordic theme of the dungeon.

So I was running a session in which I was not at all enthusiastic about. It was just kind of there. And when you are a DM running an adventure you're not excited about, it really affects the game. It was a dull, short session that ended really early. There was no life to it at all. By the end of the night, I was wondering if the campaign was dying.

I had set up the ending to that session so that our heroes would finally get to go the New York City circa 1986. Ever since I read the basic D&D adventure "The Immortal Storm" last year and its' ultra-cheesy depiction of the real world, I wanted to run an 80's movie version of New York City with cheesy accents, lame 80's gang types with bad dialogue, and people in the street holding boom boxes while riding roller skates.

As this session approached, I turned over concepts in my head. I had a basic idea of how the session would work. But I didn't put pen to paper. I was too busy with Shadowrun.

The night before this DCC RPG game, I ran Shadowrun until 3 AM. My players made me laugh so hard that I almost choked as they made fun of my badly-drawn street map (my yellow street lines were more than a little crooked). The runners hung out with their favorite gang and carefully planned a massive attack on another gang's compound (an old drive-in theatre, converted to a biker gang enclave). Then, they came up with a crazy plan involving the theft of 20 trucks, which involved "star" NPC Lacey Heels seducing and tasing a security guard.

It was such a fun session that the next day when I was supposed to be working on DCC, instead I was listening to a recording of the session laughing my face off!

I waited until the last possible minute to prepare DCC RPG. And I am talking, a half-hour before I had to leave for the game store. I quickly jotted down the ideas, cooked up some NPC names and one stat block, and I grabbed a couple issues of Crawl Zine that had some stuff I could use. Then I headed to the store.

There's some big things going on in Magic: The Gathering. Something about changing the structure of how sets are released. The store was jam-packed with Magic players. These are pretty much without exception very nice people. They get a little loud, but it could be worse.

So we jumped into this adventure that I had half-concocted... and it was awesome. By the end, one player was raving about how much fun it was, and another was asking me much time it took me to write such a detailed and involved adventure. This was one of the most well-received adventures I have run for this DCC group. Why? There are a few lessons I keep having to re-learn:

1. Do not overprepare! I always do this. When you overprepare, you create tons of details that the players might not even run into. You also burn yourself out on your own work, and because you have spent so much time on it, you end up not wanting to let your players abandon it.

2. Find out which adventure structure works with your groups the best. Some groups like to be "Railroaded". Some like the illusion of freedom. Some like dungeon crawls while others like political intrigue.

For this group, I have only run published dungeon crawls. Their choices were limited to "this door or that door?". A lot of times, they'd end up checking both doors before moving on. For this session, I modeled the structure after a Shadowrun adventure.

Well, really, it's a structure people use for all types of games. Instead of creating a chain of probable events, I just jotted down locations, enemies, friends and their motivations. I had some ideas for scenarios if the PCs went here or there, but for the most part the PCs had the freedom to go and do whatever they wanted. I created two things to steer them on course if they "got lost" in the scenario: A mysterious man reading a newspaper (an agent of law who lurked in New York City) and when the bad guys' evil ritual kicked off, there would be a swirling vortex above a skyscraper roof (like in Ghostbusters) that would be visible anywhere in the city.

We proceeded to have an adventure where Old School fantasy heroes showed up in an extremely-cheesy version of 1986 New York, complete with a hobo with a one-liner, an evil gang of karate guys (snatched out of the karate kid and re-branded to the Chaos Karate Dojo) and the weird sorcerer from Big Trouble in Little China.

The player of the party cleric loves playing snipers in first person shooters. So his cleric ended up with a sniper rifle, where he sniped everyone he could find.

The bottom line is that the players hope to go back to New York City again, and their faith in the game has been re-invigorated. Now we will begin running the 4th level published adventures. Maybe a change of pace once in a while can help keep the players (and me) interested in a long-term campaign.

At last we have begun the first adventure of the Adventurer's League! I prepared like a maniac. I took four pages of handwritten notes on the opening episode, two pages on rules notes, and one page on league rules.

Last week, I thought I had settled this weird issue with the store owner. He suddenly wanted to do two weeks of character generation, but I'd already given the players a start date (start date = tonight). I talked it over with him last week and I thought we'd settled it.. only to find a mass email today again proclaiming that this evening was another character-making session.

When I went into the store, the other employees had no idea I was starting the season this week. I just started it anyway. Stuff like this happens quite a bit at this store. It used to bother me, but now I kind of know the routine and in the end I just run my adventure and go about my business. The game store employees are nice people, but there are definitely some communication issues. What I don't understand is that the owner and I came to an agreement face-to-face, and then he went ahead and proceeded as if we'd never had the discussion.

I was interested to see how many players would show up for this, the opening salvo of an entirely new edition of Dungeons & Dragons. We normally get about 7 players. Tonight we had 15!

The problem was that half of them came to make a character. I couldn't run an adventure and help 7 people make characters at the same time! Eventually a store employee took that role over.

As I expected, the Brony didn't have a character ready despite ample warnings. He is one of the players who do not think about D&D or do the tiniest bit of work on his character outside the session. I honestly have no idea why he even comes. This week he ended up relegated to the "make a character" table. If that was me, I'd be very frustrated. He didn't seem to mind.

I ended up with 8 players, which is one over the limit. Hey, I'm not going to make someone leave the store.

Our brand-spanking-new heroes arrived at the town of Greenest at 9 PM. The village is under attack by an army and a blue dragon! Our fresh-faced level one heroes race toward Greenest to help fend off the attack.

I tried to emphasize that the PCs should use flaws and bonds to gain inspiration but none of them bit on it, not even a little. The players might still be getting used to how everything works.

I also tried to work in some Ed Greenwood Realmslore, such as the swear: "Dark and Empty!". I really wanted to use "Blood of the Lady!" but it doesn't seem appropriate for a game store.

Seek the Keep:

So I threw 6 kobolds at them, and the heroes slaughtered them. Then they came upon a woman with a spear and shield battling kobolds, trying to protect her husband and children. I really like that it's the wife doing the fighting. I could see one player's non-playing daughter become very interested as I described that scene. I was subtly trying to demonstrate to her that this is a game where everybody of every gender gets to be awesome. At the end of the night she decided she wanted to play next week.

From there, our heroes are meant to lead the family to the keep, the only safe place in town. I made sure to describe a few instances of the blue dragon swooping down out of the sky to roar or swipe at citizens. The dragon encounter actually comes up later, but I was doing my best to make this a complete experience.

As the heroes head toward the keep, they have three encounters. The module is very vague. It lets the DM cook up whatever he or she wants. This is mostly good. Though this makes preparing the module similar to opening a ZIP file, or maybe reading a recipe and then cooking a meal. You need to look up monster stats (kobolds and cultists) and come up with scenarios. My three situations:

1. Bad guys are looting a home.
2. Bad guys are looting dead bodies of villagers and slitting their throats.
3. Bad guys are trying and failing to set a thatch roof on fire (the adventure is specific about how the homes do not burn easily).

The heroes had the option of slipping past all of these without combat. There was a bit of debate amongst the players about doing just that. But each time, Hack and Slash Guy would declare that the town needed to be defended and he charged in.

This lead to fights where he and other PCs were nearly killed. The kobolds have a deal where they get advantage to hit enemies that one of their allies are adjacent to. So every fight, there would only be one or two PCs near the kobolds which meant that they'd get swarmed.

Characters made death saves in every fight! The paladin used up his lay on hands and most of the healing was burned through as well. Both fighters even used their second winds.

By the third scenario, the group really wanted to just slip past the bad guys. Hack and Slash Guy again insisted on killing them. This time, the group actually split up. Hack and Slash and three PCs charged the bad guys while the rest of the party ran for the keep. Hack and Slash was stabbed repeatedly by three kobolds and came extremely close to dying.

As this battle came to an end, a rift formed in the group. A new player took Hack and Slash to task - he'd nearly gotten a bunch of people killed due to his recklessness. It was fascinating to see. Hack and Slash Guy has been mindlessly charging everyone and everything for about 6 months now, and this is one of the first times a player has put their foot down. I have no idea how this is going to play out in future weeks.

I had kind of hoped the heroes would slip past the bad guys so we could get to some of the "missions". I'd planned on the heroes using the old tunnel to deal with the church of Chauntea encounter, but time was already up.

The new edition has brought in this weird changing of the guard as far as the players go. Some old timers are dropping off, and this new aggressive crop has jumped in head-first. In a way it is sad, because I was comfortable with the old bunch. Then again, the old bunch could be a bit of a headache. The old group had no idea about rules or what their character could do. This new bunch are really on top of everything and put the old-timers to shame.

The session had a bit more fighting than I'd have liked, but overall it was pretty good. The heroes each got 106 XP (I didn't factor in the 50 xp per rescued NPC yet), no gold at all, and no magic items. From what I understand, there are almost no magic items in these first few episodes. That will not go over well at all.

But I really like this adventure and I expect big things from the weeks to come.

If you haven't seen it, definitely check out this quick Tyranny of Dragons video.

Before I jump into tonight's Dungeon Crawl Classics adventure, I just want to recommend that you check out Bryce Lynch's scathing review of Hoard of the Dragon Queen for 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. While I do not agree with everything he says, I like his reviews because he just puts it right out there and is pretty insightful. The poor guy is suffering through each of those wordy 2e Dungeon Magazines, and it's not like he gets paid. I'd be crabby too.

Last week I was able to inject life into my mighty World Tour Dungeon Crawl Classics game through a long-awaited jaunt to 1986 New York City. After that session, I sat down and went over my notes from the last ten adventures and tried to put together ideas for the future. I mostly just wanted to give my players a better sense of continuity, as it felt like I'd neglected the game a bit.

But the most important thing that happened this week is that I finally took the advice of readers - I downloaded the Crawler's Companion. I am not an app guy. I have a tablet and I use it a bit, but I have never really tried to use an app like this before. All I can say is that this thing completely changed my game for the better and pumped my enthusiasm up about 100%.

The companion is completely free. It rolls dice. It gives me info on every spell (which completely saves me from the thing I like least about DCC - flipping pages looking up spells in the middle of a session). It has rules notes. It has all of the critical hit, corruption and fumble tables. In short, this thing has everything and makes running the game much, much easier.

So tonight I made the acquisition of The Balance Blade a very big deal. It can, after all, sway the balance between law and chaos. There was also a lot of little stuff involving their home and their NPC allies.

I had prepared the first section of an adventure called Blades Against Death for tonight. It is written by Harley Stroh, an author who I haven't had much success with. He wrote Fate's Fell Hand, which I had a hard time running and had lingering questions about even after it was over (I still don't know what the wizards wanted the deck of fates for to begin with). He also did Doom of the Savage Kings which I didn't like much, either.

I think that Harley Stroh has good ideas, but I don't like the way his adventures are organized. His work is also very dense. One of the reasons I like Michael Curtis so much is that his stuff reads quick. Harley has whole paragraphs in this adventure that are flavorful but unnecessary, and despite all the extra text, crucial details feel omitted (or maybe they're there but I just get lost in the wall of text).

As an example, the heroes are supposed to kick this thing off with a tarot reading. It is cool. The heroes even get to pick one card, and it gives them a boon (useful ones! My players gained 7 hit points for the duration of the adventure, and will get to keep 3 permanently if they complete the adventure).

Jim Holloway... just had to make it goofy.

This adventure is about the heroes going after an item that can bring an ally back to life. But the tarot reading is so vague that there is a good chance the players will have absolutely no idea where to go or what to do next. Here's part of the reading: “Death laughs at the ploys of the Raven and the Maid, one with portal, the other blade. Before your quest is done you shall gamble your lives with the hoary king.”

OK.. well.. where are we going? What are we doing? That's just too vague, at least for my players. And the entire adventure hinges on figuring out what this lady is talking about. The module says if the PCs can't figure it out, then a two-headed raven gives them a note with a symbol of the goddess of the moon on it. See, the item they seek is in the moon temple, appearing once every full moon. So.. yeah. Maybe your groups would have no problem with this, but I knew my heroes would not have clue one.

Not that this is a bad adventure. It is awesome. The scenario here is that our heroes need to infiltrate the moon temple and steal an artifact that appears once per month in a ceremony - a really cool ceremony. I suppose the heroes could try to hack-and-slash their way through, but I don't think it would work. With 10 guards, 5 priestesses and 40-80 devotees all in the chamber during the ceremony, your PCs are almost certain to be over-run and tossed into a 150 foot deep pit.

This adventure requires planning on the part of the adventurers. Clever tricks, disguises, fast-talking, all sorts of fun stuff. It is really great.

I tried to warn the players that this was a different adventure. We've been doing nothing but mindless dungeon romps for a long time now, and they were completely lost in this. They found the temple. After lots of hemming and hawing, they got some devotee robes and went to the temple on the night of the ceremony. Then they watched the whole ritual unfold. They saw the artifact appear. They saw the main priestess take it into a back room. The ritual was over. The eunuchs asked everyone to leave. Then our heroes.. stood there.

They could not think of what to do next. All of the other devotees left the temple. The priestesses and eunuchs started poking the heroes, ordering them to leave. Finally the adventurers were about to attack, only to realize that they had all anointed themselves with holy oil which magically prevented them from attacking the priestesses (Added vagueness: this extremely important fact is not listed in the section on the oil... it is buried in the two pages detailing ways to handle stealing the artifact).

So they went home.

Hoo boy. Rough one! They took it with good humor. They decided to sleep and then break in the next day to steal the artifact (More vagueness: The artifact slowly fades into nothing over the course of the month. How long is it usable for? Does it have to be used on the first night to sever the chain in part two of the adventure? Isn't that kind of important to know?!). The trusty NPC familiar helpfully suggested that the heroes see if they could get into the temple through the sewers.

The sewer entrance into the temple is a nifty little encounter. There's a grate 15 feet up to a room where there's these little plague rats. They bite your hands as you try to open the grate. No big deal, right? The room's got blood and gore from dead sacrificed people, it's a neat little area to show that this cult is definitely bad news and that stealing from them might actually do some good.

Quick, tell me how many attacks the plague rats get.

These plague rats slaughtered my party. Not kidding! They are a special sort of encounter/monster/swarm. For each point they hit you by, they do d3 damage. So if you have an AC of 17 and I roll a 25 to hit (I rolled two natural 20's in this fight, with +5 to hit, so that's 25 total plus the crit chart) that means I do 9d3. Remember, this is a game where PCs have 15-25 hit points. It was brutal. One guy got critted and fell back into the sewer tunnel, breaking his ribs. He lived. A party wizard got critted. She went down. The party decided to abandon her. They fled from the plague rats. She was devoured.

The plague rat entry is very confusing to me. First off, if you just glance at it, you see the stat block there and you go "oh, 13 rats." Then you "see above" and you might skim to the "d3 damage per point above the AC" part. It is very easy (for me, anyway) to miss the very important "Every round make a single attack roll against any PC within the chamber" part.

That should be listed concisely below the stat block, worded differently! It says "Make a single attack roll against any PC". Does that mean they collectively get one attack? Or do they attack each PC in the room one time!? What about if they spill into the tunnel? If you look at the stat block, it's listed as if each plague rat gets its' own attack. The entry says that the rats climb onto a PC and bite them, which doesn't jibe with the whole "single attack roll against any PC in the chamber" well.

The wording didn't cause this encounter to be deadly - my dice did. Two crits, and a handy monster crit chart courtesy of the Crawlers Companion laid waste to our heroes.

So tonight's session was a fiasco. It was not a negative experience at all. The players took it in good humor. But to sum it up: The adventurers went into the temple to steal an artifact and never actually tried to steal it, then they left the building when asked. The following day, they tried to sneak in through the sewer and were chased off by a bunch of rats. Unreal.

We just finished up the second session of Hoard of the Dragon Queen at the game store. I was excited about this session, because I had planned on running the blue dragon encounter. Yes, in this adventure, the 1st level adventurers have a skirmish with a blue dragon that has over 200 hit points.

The store went from one table with 7 players to three tables with a total of 18 players! 5th edition is bringing them in, that is for sure. The question now is whether we can keep them.

In last week's post, I mentioned that a player brought his daughter who decided to try playing this week. Once in a while, you come across a legendary D&D character. Tonight, this 7 year old girl debuted one of the most epic characters of all time: Dark the Dragon Sorceress.

Greenest was under attack by an army and a dragon. Our heroes had arrived at the village, rescued a family and hacked their way through the hordes to get to the safety of the keep.

The heroes were hurt badly. The adventure says they can take a short rest if they like. They did so. Then Escobar the Red asked them to meet with Governor Nighthill, who was up on the parapet overlooking his besieged town.

He had a bandage on his head, his arm was in a sling and his tunic had a blood stain on it. He recruited our heroes (who angrily demanded gold!) to sneak through a never-used secret tunnel to go back into the town to rescue citizens barricaded in the temple of Chauntea.

The Secret Tunnel:

There's a rat's nest where rats attack if the PCs disturb it. They did not. Pretty cautious on their part! I was impressed. The exit to the tunnel has a rusty lock on it. The key or thieves' tools will break off in it on a bad roll, which is a very cool little detail.

Upon exiting the tunnel, the heroes crossed a shallow stream and were spotted by cultists and kobolds. A battle broke out. The father of the little girl stealthed around and backstabbed some enemies, while his daughter - DARK THE DRAGON SORCERESS - fired off ranged spells and then closed in with her dagger for the kill.

Yes, that's right. Dark has a freaking 17 strength and she will not hesitate to stab you to death. She took down a kobold and I asked her to tell me how she killed it. She said "I stab it in the arm!"

At the end of the night, she showed me drawings of her character. She had been working on them with her dad as we played. I really wish I could have taken pictures of them to post here, but I wasn't sure if that was appropriate to ask. One picture was of Dark, who is sort of gothic with face paint and red hair. And then there's a cutesy picture of the 225 hit point blue dragon, with big shiny eyes with horns whose tips end in hearts. It was beyond epic.

The heroes mopped the floor with the bad guys and made their way toward the church while clinging to shadows.

Sanctuary:

This is a nice, elaborate encounter. There's scared citizens barricaded in the church. Outside the church (which is gigantic) are three groups of bad guys. One group is trying to use a ram to bash the door open. Another group is trying to set a fire by the back entrance. The third group is circling the place, throwing stuff through the windows, hooting and hollering.

The heroes stealthed to the back, took positions behind or on nearby buildings, and then took out the bad guys in a quick but deadly fight. Those kobolds with their advantage when an ally is adjacent are pretty deadly.

Our heroes busted into the church, calmed down the villagers and hustled them out before the front door was bashed in. Dark first declared to me that she wanted to stay in the church - alone - to take on all the bad guys!

After some discussion, she changed her mind. She was going to go with the group, but keep her eyes peeled for pursuers or enemies and take them out.

Cool, right? OK, so I had to see what would happen. So I described the scene with our heroes leading the poor villagers through the ravaged village, with Dark at the rear trailing behind, angrily keeping her eyes peeled for bad guys.

A single kobold rounded a corner. I asked her what she did. "Fireball!"

Yes, she cast fireball on one lone kobold, blowing him to smithereens. She couldn't cast that spell, but I didn't care. I was dying laughing.

Soon after, she spotted another one in a building. Fireball again! The whole building exploded!

The villagers were brought to the secret tunnel. That rats' nest was not disturbed. The villagers were rescued.

Dragon Attack:

Before the adventurers could catch their breath, there was an explosion from outside the keep. The blue dragon was attacking!

This encounter is pretty scary. I really wonder how it went in other stores. If the DM does not make it crystal clear that this monster is MUCH more powerful than the party, you are going to have serious problems. I made sure to do as the adventure advised and told the heroes that the breath weapon did 66 points of damage to a guard.

The deal here is that the dragon hovers above the wall breathing lightning down on the guards, killing d4 of them per round. While it waits for its' breath weapon to recharge, it flies up higher into the night sky. Once ten are dead, the PCs get less XP for the encounter.

The players' reactions to this situation were understandable. One player was certain that this was an illusion. Others hid behind a wall. Most of them, interestingly, tried to parlay with it. Even Hack and Slash Guy, he who charges every monster every time, tried to talk to it. The players couldn't understand what the idea was behind this encounter (the gimmick is that they need to do 24 points of damage to the dragon to get it to go away, which is a sort of difficult thing to convey to them).

Dark has dragon blood or something. Thus, she reasoned, the blue dragon probably liked her. I agreed! They entered into a telepathic dialogue (don't ask me, it just seemed like a fun idea at the time). Through this psychic conversation, Dark learned of the Cult of the Dragon's plan.

Her father in real life was playing a rogue. He saw that the blue dragon seemed to respect Dark, so he suddenly told the dragon that he was going to kill Dark if it didn't go away!

And what did Dark do? She tried to stab her dad's character!

She missed, but Dad cleverly made it look like he had been stabbed. The dragon, shocked by this turn of events, was hovering above the wall. Our heroes suddenly rushed onto the wall and unleashed ranged attacks. A critical hit was scored with a javelin, and a flung dagger found its' mark. The dragon was wounded and soared off into the night.

The guards let out a cheer! They thanked the heroes profusely. Then came my favorite part. I said, "The guards cheer, thank you and pat you on the back."

Then the little girl playing Dark told me she was grabbing the hand of the guard who patted her back.

I didn't get what she meant. Was she going to hold the guard's hand? How cute.

"I break his hand" she said, smiling.

So... a guard patted her on the back and said, "Well done!" Dark's eyes narrowed. She snatched his hand, crushed it in her mighty grip and stormed away as the shocked guard clutched his wrist and howled in pain. The guards and the party stood stunned as Episode 1 came to an end.

This was one of those classic sessions where everything goes right. Sometimes public play royally sucks, but this one was a 10 out of 10.

We jumped into episode 2 of the adventure tonight at the store. Going in, I was a little concerned. This episode is short. And they are supposed to hit level 3 by the end of it.

The scenario goes like this: The heroes head to the enemy camp, encountering two bands of cultists along the way. Both encounters can be avoided entirely. Then they get to the enemy camp of 180+ enemies, where they must infiltrate it, learn as much as they can, and possibly rescue 8 prisoners and a captive monk.

This could easily take a single session. At least, that's how it looks on paper.

An entire table of new gamers showed up this week. They made characters. This means we're now up to 4 tables. Clearly 5th edition is doing well so far.

I was sad to see that Hack and Slash Guy didn't show up this week. He didn't show up at the Thursday game either. He is a great kid... I know his football team stuff was really eating a lot of time and I think we may not see him again. He may have mindlessly hacked at everything in sight, but he was fun to play D&D with.

The 7 year old girl (actually, she said she's in 4th grade so I think she must be 9 or 10) was back with her epic character Dark the Dragon Sorceress. She wrote her name on her little standee thing and put the drawing of the cute dragon with heart-horns on it.

This week she was kind of learning how the game worked. In the beginning, Dark was storming around, refusing to go on the adventure because she was "tired". When I explained that she'd be really bored sitting at the table while everyone else went, she joined them.

A lot of the players are very new, so there's a lot of little rules things being ironed out. One kid thought he used his DEX bonus for melee. He has an 8 DEX. This explained why he never hit anything, poor guy.

We finally got to do some Downtime. How odd... this adventure clearly states that the heroes should set out after the enemy force the very next day. But if you spend ten downtime days...? Do the days actually pass? I guess not. I guess it's an abstract thing.

It didn't matter, as none of them had much interest in downtime activities, anyway.

The adventurers set out after the Cult of the Dragon. They came upon stragglers, who were split into two small camps. The party's two rogues did a lot of sneaking, which was very fun and different. Ultimately this lead to a swift slaughter of all the enemies after some eavesdropping.

The eavesdropping paid off, as the heroes learned of the "rearguard" - a small band of cultists whose job was to take out anybody who tried to follow the cult.

The adventurers came upon an ambush point and decided to just circumvent it entirely. Dark wanted to go in alone, but her dad talked her out of it. I think there was 12 bad guys there who cause a rockslide that does 2d12 damage. Dark has 9 hit points!

The heroes got to the camp, put on some cult garb and walked right in. This is what the adventure wants the PCs to do. So far, so good. They looked around. They cleverly handed off a sack of loot to the cultists - a sack stolen from the stragglers they'd ambushed.

The cultists made a comment about dumping the loot with the rest of it in the hatchery.

I was hesitant to mention the hatchery. It's in the camp, but it's not supposed to be adventured in until episode three. In addition, there's a tent in the camp full of enemy leaders that the module pretty much tells you that the PCs can not enter.

The best way to handle these things is to not even dangle it in front of the PCs. It might feel a little cheap, but it's better to do it that way then to have to block the players out in a very blatant way.

The heroes rolls suddenly went south. A cultist recognized one of the thieves from Greenest. The heroes tried to talk their way out of it, but the dice just refused to cooperate.

A fight broke out, and quickly the adventurers were surrounded by 25 cultists. Our heroes were captured and brought before Frulam Mondath (who I couldn't find much info on in the moment.. somehow this had been missed in my preparation).

She decided to execute them. They were tied to posts next to the captured monk and left overnight. They'd be killed in the morning.

One new player explained that there was no need to worry - they couldn't die or there'd be no adventure. I got to tell him what a "TPK" was, and how it was most definitely a part of D&D. The adventure would go on, young fellow, but you'll be running a different character!

One they heard that, they frantically tried to escape their bonds. Each of them tried some roll. Dark tried to use her incredible strength to break her bonds, but rolled poorly. Luckily, one PC made - the paladin. He slipped free, and freed his friends.

A lone rogue crept out and stole back the party's gear. They geared up, climbed a wall, and got the heck out of the enemy camp.

They've pretty much gotten all the way through episode two. I had figured it wouldn't take long, but wow this barely filled a session.

This episode is one where you really need to "unpack" a lot prior to the session. If you sit down 45 minutes before game time and read these four pages, you're not going to have the time necessary to fill in a lot of blanks. This requires some work on your part. You will need to cook up some details of the camp, such as how many guards are on each watchtower, what the kobolds are doing, what the acolytes are doing, some NPC names for guards questioning the PCs, etc.

If you go into this cold, you may end up with a flat session as you scramble to flesh out the scenario on the spot.

Compare this to the version on page 171

I've been nibbling away for a week on this article, which is about the Player's Handbook for the new edition of D&D. First I will go over stuff for new players, like how a roleplaying game works and the things that make this edition different from the others. Then I will ramble about the art (I love D&D art). After that, I'll pick little things out of the book that are of particular interest. Then I'll let you know if I think this edition is worth playing.

I spent hours googling the artists from the Player's Handbook to find good scans of their art. I couldn't find all the ones I like, but I found most. It almost killed me! I hope you get something out of it.

(The one piece I couldn't find that I really wanted to include is the elf casting dimension door on page 232)

How Do You Play Dungeons & Dragons?

If you are entirely new to tabletop role-playing games, here's how it works: One person runs the game. They are the "Dungeon Master". They tell you where you are, what you see, and they control every monster, shopkeeper, queen, waiter, bad guy, etc.

Love this one: Prismatic Spray by Clint Cearley

Everyone else is a "player". Each player has a character that they created. You are the hero (or villain) of a novel or a movie, and your job is to have adventures, survive and thrive in your dungeon master's world. When you achieve goals and kill monsters, you gain "experience points" and your character becomes more powerful. You can also acquire magic items that do all sorts of things, anything from a flaming sword to a cloak that turns you invisible. In roleplaying games, you can do anything you can think of. You can change the whole story on a dime if you want (don't do that too much, though, or your DM might have a heart attack).

It's all about sitting at a table with your friends and having a good time within the context of the game. The DM should make sure he or she is prepared to run the game. The DM also needs to be careful not to play favorites (for the love of all that is holy, do not use the game to hit on somebody!), not to purposely take out real life frustrations on the characters, and in general make sure that the game is fun and fair.

Elf vs. Hellhound by Craig Elliot - The No Pants/No Shield version?

The players should remember not to ruin the game for others by whining, cheating, or being a distraction (by creating excessive side-conversations or looking at their phone which, IMO, should be turned off during the game). Bottom line, if you're going to play D&D, play D&D. If you just want to hang out, drink and talk, then do that instead.

For a good example of how the game works, watch a little bit of this PAX convention game run by the best DM on the planet, Chris Perkins.

What Are the Changes in Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition?

Beth Trott got cut off big time

This version of D&D is stripped down to the core. It's most similar to 3.5/Pathfinder and the old 80's Basic Red Box. You just roll a d20 and go.

Saving throws are all keyed to your stats. If someone casts fireball at you, you make a Dexterity saving throw. If you are poisoned, you make a Constitution saving throw. Just roll a d20 and add your ability modifier.

Attacks of Opportunity are largely gone. The only time you have to worry about them is when you try to back away from an enemy.

There is no charging, unless you have the feat known as "charger". A double move is now part of the "dash" action.

Feats are optional. If you use them, you can take a feat when you hit 4th level. Normally at 4th level, you can raise two of your stats by 1 point each. You can opt to take a feat instead. The feats are very broad and kind of awesome.

Advantage: You roll twice and take the higher of the two rolls. You can get advantage in all sorts of ways... usually getting the jump on your enemies. Disadvantage is the opposite - you roll twice and take the lower of the two rolls.

Page 272 - they really ruined this one in the book

Advantage is meant to replace all of the varying bonuses that slowed the game down in previous editions.

Inspiration: A reward for playing up your character's background. When you have inspiration, you can use it to give yourself advantage on one roll of your choosing.

Downtime: This is an abstract system to help you handle your character's "off" days when you're not out on an adventure. I go over this in detail here.

Basically you can train, craft, recover from diseases, etc.

The Art of 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons

I've gone over my feelings on the art in previous columns. I'm not a fan at all of the "page rips" and the "coffee stains" that make up the background of the art in the 5e books. I also am not enamored with a lot of the art in the player's handbook. It just looks a bit blurry and uninspired. I don't know a lot about modern art techniques using tablets, but I am kind of wondering if this is simply a technology issue.

My favorite illustration in the PH, by Alessandra Pisano

That said, as I dig up the art from the sites of the artists, I am kind of seeing that these artists have done some really good stuff - mostly for magic the gathering. But the more I look, and I've googled most of them, I realize that their player's handbook art is getting all chopped up when placed in the book. Most of these pieces are shown in part, half-obscured by a page rip! Their art was done a disservice. I honestly thought the art in the PH was largely awful until I looked up the actual art pieces on the artists' blogs and websites.

I also couldn't help but notice that one of my favorite pieces of art - the elf vs. the hellhound - was altered. Wizards had to put pants on the elf pictured above fighting the hellhound. Here's the site of Craig Elliot, the artist. I also realized that Jesper Ejsing is pretty freaking good.

As an old fogey in his mid 30's, my idea of good D&D art is stuff by Larry Elmore, Clyde Caldwell and Tony DiTerlizzi. In my largely uninformed opinion, the 5th edition stuff does not measure up. But maybe that's just me getting old. Perhaps this new art will grow on me.

I have placed my favorite pieces of PH art throughout this column. Almost all of them look much better on their own, without the spilled coffee.

DiTerlizzi... awesome

Tony DiTerlizzi has been posting new D&D art on his twitter account. I really hope wizards reaches out to him, because I think it is awesome stuff.

I would have liked to see some art that depicted some iconic D&D locations, like a hero in the tomb of horrors, something involving Strahd, maybe even a "crossover" piece of art with Tanis Half-Elven and Elminster talking with the Lady of Pain.

There is a "bar fight" scene on page 126 in what appears to be The Yawning Portal, the bar that contains an entrance to the mega-dungeon known as Undermountain. I don't really like the painting much but I appreciate the idea. There is a lot of art of items throughout the book, which is a nice touch, though most of it feels dull.

Yawning Portal bar fight

There's also a lot of depictions of locations, but the art is so vague that it's hard to make it out. As an example, I don't know what the heck the smoky blob is supposed to be on the top of page 43. A volcanic field? They might as well have just covered it with the piece of art of the infernal contract. I really like the image of the stream-ruins on page 36. I found the full image of this, by Jedd Chevrier, online (I posted it at the bottom of this article). It is really good! It looks much worse in the book.

I think that wizards tried to load this book up with art like the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG book did, but in my opinion DCC hit a home run and this is maybe, at best, a double. DCC has it a little easier as they used black and white art, which I'd imagine is much cheaper to commission.

The paper they used in this book is fantastic. There's no glare and the ink doesn't smudge when my greasy paws rub it for any length of time (you should see some of my 4e adventure booklet covers.. it's like a crime scene). The paper has a sort of "wetness" to it, smooth to the touch and heavy in a weird way. Fantastic!

Random Thoughts on The Player's Handbook

Page 104 The Wild Magic table is incredibly useful. I always loved the wild magic table in the Tome of Magic and this is probably going to get a lot of use in my games. It kind of makes me want to make a wild magic dungeon, actually...

Page 109 Warlocks can take on patrons like The Great Old One. Entities of this type include Ghaunadaur, Tharizdun and "Great Cthulhu". CTHULHU.

Page 114 There's a sidebar discussing spellbooks. It takes 2 hours and 50 gold per spell level to copy a spell into your book. I kind of wish they made a little random table of different types of spellbooks, like one long scroll, or a book made of dragon hide, etc.

Page 154 Tools are really odd. All that to add your proficiency bonus to certain rolls? It's so vague as to who can do what if you aren't proficient with certain tools. I guess if you use thieves' tools but you aren't proficient, you make the check with disadvantage?

The cover art unfettered by Tyler Jacobson

Page 157 Lifestyle expenses are especially handy because it gives us a good idea of how much money NPCs make - which is something that was always difficult to determine in previous editions. Here, we know joe schmoe probably makes a bit more than 1 gp per month as that covers their living expenses. So maybe a modest wage for someone with a family would be 1 gp per week?

Page 168 I really hated feats in 3rd edition. But I really like these feats in this book, Particularly Mage Slayer. If you're adjacent to someone casting a spell, you can attack them. You can also disrupt their concentration and you get advantage on saves vs spells. It reminds me of the Spellslayers from Al Qadim. I think it is a cool idea to have a character who specializes in taking down spellcasters, seems like it could make for a cool campaign.

Page 175 I really wish they hadn't bothered with passive skill checks. I barely used them in 4e, and it lead to a lot of complaints by players when something bad happened that maybe/might/probably wouldn't have been auto-detected by a passive skill. In my opinion, as DM, you have to account for passive skills when preparing your adventure. You're just not going to remember them in the heat of the moment.

This Reynolds art is half-obscured in the PH

Page 177 I have never been comfortable with hiding. Players always try to run, hide and attack all in the same round. It feels wrong - too difficult to adjudicate fairly.

Page 189 Surprise is left up to the DM to a degree. You could compare a PC stealth check to the enemy's passive perception (ugh). If you win, you basically get a free round of attacks and movement.

Page 190 Getting up from prone costs half your speed!

Page 204 The little chalkboard drawing of the different Areas of Effects of spells is very helpful. Most of the stuff seems like 4e bursts and blasts (which I love) re-worded.

In the back of the book, there's a section on the planes. In 4th edition, there were four planes: The Feywild, The Shadowfell, The Astral Sea and The Elemental Chaos. In 5th edition, they've brought back a lot of the old stuff from previous editions like The Beastlands (which I always hated) and Mechanus (which I love). A lot of these planes were folded into one of the 4e "big four", but now they are all separate again.

Magic Missile on page 200 - compare!

I am very happy that they kept and integrated the 4e planes, although it's a bit of a bummer that it is the astral "plane" again, not the astral "sea". Though I guess the astral sea could be a place found within the astral plane.

I'm also very happy that they brought back the planes of positive and negative energy. If you remember, the demi-plane of minerals borders the positive energy plane and sort of fuels the creation of ioun stones. I rambled about all of this in a previous article all about ioun stones.

The book lists pantheons and deities from many settings, including the Forgotten Realms (the core seteing of 5e), Greyhawk (THE D&D setting IMO), Dragonlance, and Eberron. There's also a great list of demi-human deities. You might want to track down the old AD&D monster mythology book. You can probably get it for a couple bucks and it is a fantastic resource that has most of these non-human deities in it.

They also list Celtic, Greek, Egyptian and Norse gods. I've never been into using "real" mythology in my D&D games, but hey maybe it will work for you.

You can get the basic rules completely free here. The only difference between the basic rules and the player's handbook is that the PH has more classes, races and spells, and other extra details. The basic rules are the same as the rules in the PH.

Is Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Good?

Yeah, I think it is. It's snappy, it's simple. It's still D&D. The fights take 5 minutes instead of an hour of 4th edition. It remains to be seen if this edition will suffer complications at higher levels like 3rd edition did.

I've run a number of playtest campaigns over the last year and we didn't have any problems.

But I have seen quite a bit of worry online that "min/maxers" will "break" this game with ease. 4th edition did a pretty fantastic job of balancing things in that regard. 5th is much more loose and it seems very likely that power gamers will do their thing.

My favorite landscape, by Jedd Chevrier. Extreme zoom in the PH page 36

Here's the bottom line. If you don't like power gamers, don't play with them. DMs, you can shut this behavior down. You make the rules, you are not bound by the book. This is how D&D has always been. If somebody is bending a rule to "cheat code" the game, just tell them you're not allowing it. If they can't handle this, they need to find another group.

Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition is really good, it's as simple as that. You should definitely check it out.

Shadowrun 5th Edition

The Sea Queen Escapes - Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG

White Plume Mountain - D&D 5th Edition

The Bag of Holding - Everyone's Favorite D&D Magic Item

Tyranny of Dragons - Things to Know About The D&D Adventurer's League

The Balance Blade - Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG

White Plume Mountain - Blackrazor in D&D 5th Edition

Tyranny of Dragons - Hoard of the Dragon Queen: The First Official Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Adventure

Everything You Need To Know About Mind Flayers

The 13th Skull - Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG

The Dungeon Master Basic Rules - Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition

White Plume Mountain - Whelm in 5th Edition

Shadowrun 5th Edition - The Essentials

White Plume Mountain - Wave in Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition

Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG - Castle Greyhawk and Sniper Rifles

Hoard of the Dragon Queen - Seek the Keep

Blades Against Death - Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG

Hoard of the Dragon Queen - Dragon Attack

Hoard of the Dragon Queen - Raiders' Camp

Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - The Player's Handbook