The role of adventurers has evolved throughout the editions of the Dungeons & Dragons game. Initially, they were dungeon delvers, mercenaries, and treasure hunters. But the newer editions portray and depict the player characters as the heroes of epic tales. And yet many groups are little more than lawless murder hobos terrorizing the realm with their insane power levels and destructive capabilities. So I ask you, what would be the opinion of most folk be of these adventurers?  "What is an adventurer? One who goes on adventures? I say that an adventurer is a hero. And what is a hero? A hero is someone with the strength of heart, courage of spirit, and the might of will to go to strange lands and enact violence on the things there. We go to places where there are things that must be destroyed, and we destroy them. Wandering from town to town, getting into trouble, meeting in flophouses and taverns, and getting into scrapes with the law, and otherwise finding ourselves engaged in...

Just got back from The Gamer's Wharf  where I ran the first of two D&D adventures to cover the game slots usually occupied by Brett and Mike. They're both at GenCon and this seemed like a good time to show the group what my style of DMing looks like. I overpacked and under prepared, couldn't find half my notes, and just ran things the way I thought would be most enjoyable. I had fun. The players seemed to have fun. I think it went well and I feel like I set things in place for more adventure tomorrow. It wasn't really certain how many folks were going to make it to the game today. At minimum there was going to be three players, but attendance could have been as high as seven players. That would be a big, hard to manage group, but I prepared accordingly. We ended up with a very reasonable four players; Bob, Brent, Caroline, and Joshua. I made adjustments and things went well. No characters died.  So what happened and how did it go? For starters, that title " Pr...

I'm just gonna do it. Enough talk. If we don't push this bird out of the nest it'll just sit in the tree forever. And with that decision made, I'm going live with the Adventure: Tombs of Cathedra open table.  Saturday & Sunday I'm going to run a two part adventure for the Random Encounter group while our DM is at Gen Con. I'm expecting at least 6 players each day, maybe as many as 8. It's going to be a gang of 3rd level characters and I'm calling part one, Probably an Owlbear , and part two is going to be  The Anchorite Crypt . I've never run a game for any of these folks so I'm hopeful that my playstyle and theirs will mesh nicely and everyone will have fun. Starting Wednesday, and every other following Wednesday, I'm going to be running the open table at The Gaming Warehouse . I've got 3-4 interested players from the opposite Wednesday game that have expressed an interest, and that's a good start. I posted my event on the store...

I saw the Untold Encounters of the Random Kind book on Amazon a while back, and having liked the Loke Battlemats 2-book sets, I added it to my RPG Stuff list. It's a very long list. Today, I found it at one of my local hobby shops, just sitting on the shelf tucked away among a whole lot of other things I wasn't particularly interested in. I picked it up to give it a look-see and my immediate thought was, damn this is a heavy book. It feels disproportionally heavy for it's size. My second thought was, why do they have to wrap all these books in plastic? I'd really like to give it a flip through. It was $10 less than on Amazon, so I bought it. Having taken the plastic wrap off and given it a flip-through, I can now give you my initial thoughts on the thing. It's a heavy, 339 page book of random tables and idea prompts. There's not a bunch of highly detailed ideas and tiny adventures, this is a book of generalities. Which is how I like my ideas. The back cover br...

Tonight, I spent my Amazon credit to watch Secrets of Blackmoor: The True History of Dungeons & Dragons. It's not great, certainly not something for a disinterested audience, but if you're interested in the history of D&D or RPGs it's very interesting. Features a cast of alumni from the Blackmoor Group which was Dave Arneson's game group. An interesting discussion of how tabletop roleplaying developed and evolved to become the games we know today. Dave Arneson & Gary Gygax brought us D&D, but they didn't do so from a vacuum. There were a lot of other contributions pulled from the community of gamers from which they assembled their game. Much like today, it's the community of gamers all trying to make their games better and more fun that drives this hobby forward. 

Having picked up the Tome of Beasts trio and having been impressed with the content and quality of those products I made the decision to grab the Creature Codex and add it to my collection of 5e books. It's a beast of a monster book, easily twice the thickness of most of my other books. This thing is a fatty. There's something like 400 creatures in this codex, including new varieties of angels, demons, dragons, dinosaurs, and golems. There are entries for a bunch of leader type creatures found in the Monster Manual, like centaurs, goblins, and a more. And a bunch of new undead that will be handy for the Adventure: Tombs of Cathedra setting. The back of the book includes sorted lists of the creatures by type, challenge rating, and terrain. It's everything you would expect from a monster book. There's some text about Midgard, the Kobold Press world setting, but you can use that or ignore it without any real impact. It's all flavor. You might even be inspired by some o...

My copy of the Shadowdark RPG has arrived. I've had the PDF for a few days. I ordered the hardcover book from The Arcane Library website and got the digital version immediately so as to tide me over and quench my curiosity. To put my feelings right up front; I really like this product. I like the idea behind it, the feel of the book, the look of the art, and the presentation of this particular flavor of 5e. It's very nicely done. This book presents a game that is very much classic fantasy roleplaying. Dungeon exploration is the main course, but there's rules here that extend that feel beyond the catacombs and into a world that meshes together nicely. This whole product gives me the feels that I had when I was first running and playing D&D in junior high. The players are adventurers on an adventure. They might become heroes, but they are not assumed to be heroes from the get go. They'll need to face the horrors in the dark and survive those horrors before they get ...

Too much to process... What have I done to myself? What was I thinking? I went out and had The Gamer's Warf get me all three of the Tome of Beasts books. I received a little performance bonus from work and this is what I've done with it. Now I'm suffering from an overabundance of monsters. What we're looking at here is 10 lbs. of beastly goodness. These three tomes come in at 1,260 pages of monster hunting possibilities. That's something like 1200 beasts, give or take, I'm not going to actually count them up. I haven't done much beyond flip through these three big books. They're each over 400 pages of beasts. The pages are glossy, the books well made, the art is good, and the monsters are plentiful. I'm not going to go through each entry and critique what I like and what I don't. There's too much. Too many things to look at. I image that these books are going to be a source of content for my games that will slip in slowly and over time as I ...

The Dungeon Master for our D&D: Adventures in Eberron campaign took the night off and I took the opportunity to offer up a 1-Shot adventure for anyone who was interested. Three out of the four players who expressed interest showed up and that turned out to make for a great, fast moving game session. I provided some pregenerated 1st-level characters so that we could skip making characters and get right into the gameplay. Which worked out, because they were able to make it through the entire adventure in the 2.5 hours allotted to us. They chose a fighter, a cleric, and a rogue. Which is just about the perfect party for delving into an ancient tomb full of restless spirits and deadly traps. The Hook: The tavernkeep has been sponsoring scavengers into the ruins. His last group of proteges had a bit of bad luck and only one of them made it back to the fort. But... they did find a way in to the crypt. There is a cave above the tomb to the north. Some resourceful grave robbers have dug ...

I saw these dice on Etsy and thought they would be perfect for Walton Glaives, Investigative Wizard Extraordinaire & Abjuration Savant. But they were expensive and I couldn't justify the purchase. Still can't, but I got into a mood and bought them anyway. The fact that they offered a 11-die set was the kicker. They're very wizardry. These are the Sapphire Blue Astrology Dice Set by CrystalMaggie on Etsy. I picked them up on sale, 25% off, but they still cost me $85. Which is more than I paid for the beautiful metal Die Hard Dice I picked up a few years back. I can be a spendthrift, but dice are not a thing that should cost a lot of money. The dice arrived today, so how does the reality of them compare to the website? The first three pictures are from the website and make the dice look stunning. The pictures above are just me snapping a couple quick shots with my phone, they look less stunning, but still nice. I added the grey d20 in there to show that these dice are sli...

Today, I am joining a new group of fellow adventurers. It's another D&D 5e game, this time DMed by my buddy Bob, who plays the half-orc trio in Random Encounters and was part of our initial Cyberpunk crew. My understanding is that it'll be 6 players and every session will be a level for the first 10 levels.  I'm late to the party, because I thought I needed to leave room in my schedule for my own campaign. Apparently not; we haven't played since November, so that may have died the unspoken death. Anyway, they're level 5, so I assume I've missed at least that many sessions. I've decided to play a dwarf barbarian in this game and that's what I showed up to the table with... Druss Lorgan the Ironroar , blackest name amongst the Shield Dwarves of Icewind Dale. Mountain dwarf. Path of the berserker barbarian. Inspired by a mix of David Gemmell's Druss the Legend and Joe Abercrombie's Logan Ninefingers . He's a big, powerful dwarf who's see...

Let’s look at character advancement in Dungeons & Dragons using the numbers from the core rules and assuming a medium difficulty encounter. You can see that the number of encounters per level to advance is all over the place, resulting in certain levels taking many more challenges to advance than others. Using the XP Table, you’ll face an average of 11.6 medium encounters to level a character. The actual number ranges from 6 to more than 17 encounters. This triggers something in our brains and makes us want to fix the system.  We're not even going to reference the Adventuring Day XP chart in the Dungeon Master's Guide … that is just a crazy thing that we propose you ignore. Player’s Handbook Dungeon Master’s Guide Adventure: Tombs of Cathedra Class Level Experience Points Medium Challenge  XP Threshold Challenges To Next Level House Rule Experience Points Challenges To Next Level 1 0 50 6 0 10 2 300 100 6 500 10 3 900 150 12 1,500 10 4 2,700 250 15.2 3,000 10 5 6,500 500 ...

I've been waiting for the dates on the revised core rules for D&D and they have finally been released. I have mixed feelings. I'm very excited to see them and get my copies, but the dates just don't make much sense to me. 2024 Player's Handbook                      September 17, 2024 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide November 12, 2024 2025 Monster Manual                     February 18, 2025 First off, it's the 50th anniversary of the game and they can't even get all the books out this year, which means it'll be next year before we can all get our boxed set of the three rulebooks. That's pretty lame. They missed the actual anniversary, which was at the end of January, and would have been the best date in my book, but probably not great from a sales and marketing standpoint. The end of January would miss the holiday season and be right, smack-dab, in the middle o...

This session the table is made up by the following characters: Aurora Sylvan , helf-elf ranger Carsten Birch , human cleric Caverick Strawton , human druid Edgarial Grandsword , elf wizard-artificer Xaerv , human fighter Managing the chaos is the incomparable, DM Emily . Having followed the wide avenue into the heart of the ancient ruined city of the giants, we found an enormous amphitheater backed up against the rising wall of the ravine. Nesting comfortably within this once grandiose ruin we found a great feathered beast of a dinosaur, and I think rightfully decided this must be the King of Feathers we'd been warned about. The great beast was asleep as we stumbled upon it and we quickly retreated up into the stands to decide on our plan and leave us room for evasive action should the thing awaken before we were suitably prepared for the coming battle. Higher up in the stands we came upon a fellow explorer who was also deciding on a course of action. Aurora Sylvan, this half-elven...

There seems to be some uncertainty surrounding the actual release date for the original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, but based on my limited research of others work who have done considerably more research, it would seem the game was released in late-January 1974. Several of my sources have decided upon the 26th as the day to mark the anniversary and I have no contest with that date. And having prefaced this with all that, today is the 50th Anniversary of the Dungeons & Dragons game. Long live the king. The game has gone through many rule changes, variations, and editions in those 50 years, but it continues to thrive as both a game and an idea.  There had never been anything like it before and it continues to be a fount of inspiration and entertainment for those of us who love the game, the hobby, and dare I say, the lifestyle.  Dungeons & Dragons is my favorite game, it is my primary hobby, and it is the thing that probably most def...

Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons and Dragons by Ben Riggs and read by Sean Patrick. Hopkins is available on Hoopla  and has a runtime of 10h 28m.  I thought I had a pretty good idea of the story Ben Riggs was going to tell when I started this audiobook. Afterall, I lived through the fall of TSR, I subscribed to Dragon magazine, and I've listened to Game Wizards by Jon Peterson, but this was not what I expected. This was that same story, but the story wasn't the same. Or rather, the retelling of the story was different than what I expected. And it went on well past the ousting of Gary Gygax. It changed my opinion of Lorraine Williams, explained a lot of the untold bits, and made me better understand the utter mess that TSR had gotten itself into.  Slaying the Dragon tells the untold story of how TSR, the company that created Dungeons & Dragons, was driven to the brink of disaster, saved, then driven into ruin by disastrous management decisions a second ...

All the social media hype about the Dungeons & Dragons product hitting the discount outlets was mostly not something I was interested in. The stuff they were offering was either product I didn't want or had never heard of, but I was next door to Ollie's today and figured I'd just take a little look see at was on offer. They had some D&D stuff like action figures, the campaign packs, and a board game. Nothing I wasn't expecting. No surprises. I couldn't bring myself to buy the Dragonlance Warriors of Krynn game for $9.99, but at $2.99 each buying both of the Campaign Cases seemed like a fair trade. I'll show you a picture of the contents, but I'm not going to waste much digital ink describing them or their content. You can see what comes in the boxes in the pictures above. The boxes are cool looking and hold all the stuff that comes in them. Handy. You get a bunch of bases/tokens in the creature box and some dry/wet erase boards in the terrain box, bu...

It is the night before Christmas and all through the house rings the sound of the vacuum cleaner and festive music. Will we get another Amazon delivery? Only Santa knows. While Walton Glaives is ready to get back to the adventure and deal with this Red Wizard of Thay, once and for all, I don't think I could convince my wife that Christmas Eve D&D is a good thing. So while Walton may be in something of a sulk, I'll be doing family things for the holiday. Drinking eggnog, wrapping gifts, eating cookies, cleaning the house, and preparing for the biggest gift giving holiday of the year. Having bought several gifts for myself, I assure you that I have some cool stuff to show you in the very near future. Enjoy your holidays and have yourself a very merry Christmas. Wishing you a Merry Christmas --Ronn

There is no reason for me to buy this thing. I have a perfectly functional dice tray that I don't use. I have a folding dice tray that I carry in my DM kit. I don't need this thing, it's too long, and too expensive. Having said that, please take my money. I present to you the Tray of Rolling, officially licensed Dungeons & Dragons dice tray by Ultra PRO. It'll cost you $20, for a good looking box with no lid. It doesn't even come with a cheap set of dice. This enormous thing has a premium leatherette lining debossed with the D&D ampersand logo on the inside and a red foil logo on black exterior sitting on non-slip pads. It's a whopping 13.5 inches long by 6.5 inches wide with a 1-inch wall height, you're going to be taking ups some serious table space with this accessory, but it will save the table from all those sharp edged metal dice you're throwing around. It is a good looking dice tray, but damn, Ultra PRO has my number. Is it really the perf...

I do not know anything about tarot cards or tarot reading. I don't have any other tarot decks or plan to use these for readings. I bought them because they're D&D branded, because they looked nice, and possibly as a game aid. Having written all that, let me give you my thoughts on this deck. Starting with the box, the outside is nice looking and seems sturdy enough to last for years. The inside is fitted to the booklet and has a pocket for the deck with a nice ribbon to help extract the cards. The packaging is quite nice. The cards themselves are a little on the thin side, but not bad. I'd have liked them to be a little heavier stock, but they do have a good 'feel' to them. I really like the art on the back of the cards and the art on the face is very nice. They’re giving us a 78 card deck and each card is fully illustrated. The style is different from typical D&D art, but is very nice and feels right. Because this is a D&D product, each card...