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. 

  2024/05/11 Session 10: Undead at Old Owl Well (Campbell, Doug, Ronn, Zak) 9 Winterwane 5023 The Order of Righteous Peregrination sets off to investigate the reports of walking dead at the Old Owl Well and deliver a message of warning to denwar miners that the dragon has been making trouble in the area.  It was a hard 3-days travel on simple paths and trails through the forested hills and mountains east of Trinity Lake to reach the ruins of Old Owl Well.  The first day took them past some incredible vista’s, the Fairview Boat Launch where they saw the first eidola since leaving the road behind them, and they would not see another for two more days, and they crossed the Great Dam of the Ancients , which holds in place the entirety of Trinity Lake . They camped rough at Papoose Creek the first day.  10 Winterwane 5023 The second day they crested Trinity Summit , passed beneath the shadow of Blue Mountain , filled their canteens at Quartz Spring , and made a rough c...

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...

Hey all, things have been shifting around pretty unpredictably for awhile now. I'm afraid Sunday morning D&D isn't going to work with my schedule any longer and I'm going to drop from the game. It's been great and I've enjoyed playing with all of you. If things change in the future I'd be happy to come back. I'll leave the DnDBeyond campaign up so you all can continue to use it, but I won't be at the table for the foreseeable future.

  2024/04/20 Session 9: Return to Tresendor Manor (Campbell, Doug, Gryffon, Ronn, Zak) 9 Winterwane 5023 The Order of Righteous Peregrination reunited over breakfast. Sildar Hallwinter passed word to them that Gundren Rockseeker was recovering nicely as he headed to his office at town hall. Dartina was complaining about her stomach and that everything still tasted like pond scum and sat in her guts like a live trout when Grista , the denwar from the  Sleeping Giant stormed through the door and straight to their table.  “Here’s the rest of your stuff,” she said, dumping her bag of their missing possessions on the table. “Albrek says to get that skull out of his basement! Today!”  Dartina vomits up an acidic ooze which the party freezes and gives to Darnell Horatio mends the table Party goes to the cellars of Tresendor Manor and finds them vacant and dark. Party explores the cellars, struggles to stay out of the pit trap in the hallway, and finds weapons and eviden...

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...

  The adventures of both Thergale the Verdant and Walton Glaives have been put on hiatus for this Sunday so that everyone can spend time celebrating the Easter holiday in whatever fashion they will. I will be going to visit my in-laws where we hope to eat chinese food and enjoy each others company. Happy Easter! If you're into that sort of thing. Happy Sunday, if you're not.

Despite all my prep work, Thergale the Verdant isn't coming out of his folder today. I touched up the paint on his miniature. I reworked my character sheet and game reference materials. I'm just not feeling it. I just let them know in our Discord channel that I won't be there today. My voice is shot. This damn cough is annoying. And maybe I'm just tired, but I'm not feeling it today. But I will take this opportunity to wish everyone a Happy St. Patrick's day!

The Three-Dragon Problem campaign is supposed to be running monthly, but it isn't. I've got lots of ideas and plans that will probably not come to fruition. I'm enjoying it, but its a rough haul. Monthly is a tough schedule for an ongoing campaign, I don't feel I'm getting as much investment in the game as I'd like and its tough to keep everyone engaged with that much time between games. The group made characters and had our session zero in January 2023, but then it was 22-days before they got to play those characters. We ran through a 2-part adventure where we had a 28-day break between part 1 and part 2. The next session was 13-days later, but it was something of a flop, where things got bogged down in town. Then there was a huge break of 70-days before the group made it to an ambush on the road leading to a goblin bandit cave. It was another 64-days before we got back together and they walked into the town they left for seven months ago in the real world. It...