Category Archives: RPG

PaizoCon 2012 Banquet Commentary

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PaizoCon 2012 was this weekend in Redmond, Washington. PaizoCon is sponsored by Paizo of course and an event packed with Pathfinder fans. While I did not attend the event, thanks to social media I was able to keep up with the announcements that occurred at The PaizoCon Banquet that happened on Saturday night. The Banquet is where upcoming products are shown and secrets revealed.

Using what I have picked up via various social media locations including Twitter, Facebook and Paizo‘s own blog The Iron Tavern will take a look at some of the product announcements and comment on them. (I will provide a short summary of the announcement and then follow it with a comments section).

Ultimate Equipment Guide

The Ultimate Equipment Guide release is coming up quickly. The book will include all core source material and more. There will be pictures of each piece of equipment referenced in the core book and includes a section on mundane equipment. This book will use a new way to present the material and wondrous items will be presented by slot for those times your character is looking to fill a particular slot.

Comments

I am looking forward to this release. I like equipment and I am one of the types that even enjoys mundane equipment. I am likely looking forward to that chapter more than anything else! Having the equipment consolidated into one book will be quite handy and I see this as being an excellent resource for Pathfinder games (and possibly borrowing equipment for other games).

I certainly understand organizing wondrous items by slot, though it does lend to the feeling of the book being a shopping catalog for players. It will be interesting to see if it turns players into “shoppers” more so than they are now or not. Regardless, there has to be some organization system and I suppose by slot works as well as another despite the possible implication.

NPC Codex

This sourcebook was announced for November of this year and weighs in at 320 pages. It will contain one page per NPC and a statblock for every class in the core book. The builds in this book will alternate between typical builds and more atypical builds using even and odd levels as the differential.

Comments

I am in the middle of the road on this one. I will likely have a better idea of where I fall on this one after it is released. While there is certainly a need for NPCs and such, I feel like I have a good number to work now from various sources.

There is certainly something to be said in having them all in one place though. Also knowing that you can find a certain class at a certain level when picking up the book will also be a pro. At this point I am thinking this will be a good PDF resource for me, not sure I would go in for the physical product.

Ultimate Campaign

This book will be coming in the Spring of 2013 and cover what happens between adventures. Things such as improving skills, running guilds, building keeps, managing businesses and more will be included. Rules for waging war and building kingdoms will also be included as well as information for random background generation.

Comments

This book looks promising to me. There has long been an interest in some of the items that happen between adventures. Building ones estate, wealth, and such has been an area where GMs have frequently cobbled together rules for their campaigns. It will be interesting to see what the folks at Paizo come out with for this. This book could be a very valuable resource to cover all of those things between adventures we have typically run off the cuff or turned to previous edition rulebooks for.

Player Companion Line

The next volume will cover Varisia and feature a visual redesign. The idea is that these books are read in brief, five minute increments and are being designed to reflect that. Roads with distances will be added to the Varisia maps with this release.

The line is moving to a monthly release cycle and a rules index will be put in place to help make finding information easier.

Comments

I do not purchase as lot of the Player Companion Line presently. I pick one up here or there, sometimes based on reviews or if one covers a topic I have a particular interest in at the moment.

It will be interesting to see how the redesign affects my purchasing habits. Roads on maps sounds intriguing. More traits and crunch is a downside for me as I tend to feel overwhelmed by the amount of crunch via traits, feats, and archetypes as the Pathfinder line grows. I love the fluff, the crunch not so much. I am sure others enjoy the flow of mechanics with these releases, so I suspect this will prove a good move for Paizo despite my preferences.

Adventure Paths

Shattered Star is the next Adventure Path coming around the corner. This one sounds a little more like a traditional dungeon crawl. Expect gray maidens, giants, drow, a demi-lich and more from this one. Also players will be able to play as member of a Pathfinder faction.

Reign of Winter will be the next AP and brings Baba Yaga to Golarion. They announced some of the titles of each installment:

  • Snows of Summer
  • The Shackled Hut
  • Maiden Mother Crone
  • Rasputin Must Die
  • Revenge of the Witch Queen

Comments

Shattered Star will likely see my return to an Adventure Path subscriber. While I have enjoyed Paizo’s playing around the edges with the past few APs, I am looking forward to a return to a more traditional series.

Reign of Winter also sounds interesting as well. I like the area this is likely to take place in after my reading of Winter Witch and some of the scenarios from the Pathfinder Society Play.

Looks like a promising time ahead for the Adventure Path series from where I sit.

Paizo GameSpace

This is Paizo’s entry into the virtual tabletop space. Expected this summer this is a virtual tabletop that runs in a browser, no plug-ins required. It will be cross-platform as well. The VTT will not implement the Pathfinder rules system, but does include an initiative tracker and dice roller.

In efforts to minimize GM prep-work high resolution maps and tokens will be provided for adventure paths to get people up and running quickly with less prep. It will support zooming on the map and token movement. They were doing demos of this at the banquet.

The VTT will be free to use for people though it sounds like there will be pay for options for additions. The details to this are still being worked out at the moment. The primary motivation for this VTT is to provide a place for the community to play.

Comments

This strikes me as one of the big two announcements that came from PaizoCon. Gamers all around know Wizards has been working on getting a VTT out the door and to the public since 4e was announced. There have been some setbacks for them along the way and it seems that Paizo is possibly trying to fill this gap.

I think they are approaching this the right way for the moment. They have said that software is an evolving thing, so the plan is to release it early and possibly update as time goes on. The focus being to get something out there on the market and fix issues post release. By keeping the rules out of it that simplifies the project a fair amount.

The part of this announcement I am not a huge fan of is that I would like to have seen them support one of the existing free VTTs already out there. Either something like MapTool, the upcoming Tabletop Forge  or even the other newcomer, Roll20.net. These tools have a lot of the heavy lifting already complete or near complete and could readily take campaign files provided by Paizo.

I suspect Paizo is choosing to release their own simply for the control factor, i.e. they do not want to see what they base their releases on fold leaving them without a VTT. The other possibility is if they do manage to work the purchase of assets into their VTT for enhancements they stand more to gain by controlling the VTT as a whole.

I am interested to see how this one shapes up. VTTs are an excellent way to facilitate more people gaming.

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game

This was the other big announcement from the banquet in my eyes – a deck building card game from Paizo. This game is to be released at GenCon 2013 and the first set will have 400 cards. From what I have read so far it is a cooperative game and plays in about an hour.

Comments

I have mixed feelings about this. While I have no idea of the inner workings at Paizo it seems Paizo is trying to do a lot of things in a rather short time frame. We have the support of an MMO, card games, minis, VTT, and increasing the release cycle for some of their subscriptions. I just hope they don’t lose focus on producing high quality supplements and APs as we move forward.

There are some smart people that have been around this business for a long time though. I am sure they have looked at the market, the risks and what it can do for their business before these projects were given the go ahead.

With that said, I am not really in the market for a deck building game and will likely pass on this offering when it is released next year. Perhaps my initial thoughts about this game will change as the year passes.

Overall it looks like a very exciting PaizoCon Banquet this year! Lots of new things coming from Paizo as they continue to keep everyone in the RPG industry on their toes!

My DM Gave Me Homework!

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As regular readers know I have been playing in an online Google+ Hangouts game of Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG being run by Carl Bussler. We are only a couple of sessions in, but we have all been having a great time with the game.

Frequently, once a session is over for the night several of us will hangout and chat a bit before logging off for the evening. During our last session we started talking about the large Appendix N influence on DCC RPG. By the end of this discussion the we had all received a homework assignment! By the next gaming session we were to have read one work from Appendix N. We of course graciously accepted the homework assignment!

What exactly is Appendix N? Appendix N was included in the Dungeon Masters Guide written by Gary Gygax in 1979. Page 224 of the book included an appendix called Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading. This list included many of the influential works to the game of Dungeons and Dragons.

Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG is also heavily influenced by Appendix N and attempts to marry that feel with more modern mechanics. Many believe it has successfully done so.

Enough Appendix N background. With the holiday this week, we actually had two weeks to complete this homework assignment. I started looking to see which books from the list were available on the Kindle or some other electronic format. It did not take long to decide that a trip to Half Price Books was in order.

It took three trips to Half Price Books to finally find a time they were not closed due to power outages from the recent storms that passed through Ohio. I had my list with me and started the assignment by looking for any books by the following authors:

  • L. Sprague de Camp & Pratt
  • R. E. Howard
  • Fritz Leiber
  • Jack Vance
  • H. P. Lovecraft
  • A. A. Merritt

I chose these as these authors are listed as having the most influence. Given how few of them I had actually read I wanted to start with the ones being noted for having the most influence.

I had pretty good luck at finding several books and left the store with the following five books:

  • The Complete Compleat Enchanter by L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt
  • The Enchanter Reborn by L. Sprague de Camp and Christopher Stasheff
  • The Goblin Tower by L. Sprague de Camp
  • Swords in the Mist by Fritz Leiber
  • The Knight and Knaves of Swords by Fritz Leiber

I decided to start with The Complete Compleat Enchanter for the homework assignment.

The read has been quite enjoyable so far. Already I can see the influence of random magic in DCC RPG as the enchanters cast various spells and frequently get less than desired results as they learn the laws of magic.

While our homework assignment was to read one book, I am looking forward to reading many of the titles from the Appendix N list. It is sort of amazing that I have been playing these games as long as I have and not read very many of the authors on the list. This homework was just what I needed to get started with reading more items off of this list.

Others in my group have been busy picking up their reading assignments as well. I have seen several photos popping up on Google+ from the other people in our group. It has been interesting to see their finds as well as they get them posted.

Has your DM ever given you homework that was not directly related to the game? Did you find it homework that was fun to do? Homework that contributed to your gaming experience?

DCC Funky Dice

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One of the unusual facets of Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG is the use of “funky” dice. Now for the established RPG gamer, the concept of “funky” dice can be unusual. After all we already play with d20’s, d12’s, d8’s, d10’s and the beloved d4. We already play with funky dice, right?

Nope! Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG brings us some more unusual dice, including the d3, d5, d7, d14, d16, d24 and d30. This set of dice is also known as the Zocchi Dice. Some people find this an attraction to the game and others find it as a detriment. I fall into the former camp and enjoyed hunting down the new dice and rolling them during the game.

Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG uses an improved die and reduced die mechanic that moves you up and down a dice chain when rolling. For example, bumping up from a d20 with an improved die roll would be a d24 and a reduced roll from a d20 is a d16. There are also some other charts and mechanics that make use of the funky dice to determine certain results during the course of a game.

When Joseph Goodman was asked about the inclusion of these funky dice in DCC by Suvudo he replied that he simply liked funky dice. In the interview he goes on to say that part of the nostalgia surrounding old-school gaming is related to the unusual dice of the time. Back when the d20 and d4 were unusual to the old-school gamer. As time has come on those types of dice have become “normal”. DCC RPG attempts to bring some of the nostalgia back by using these funky dice that are even new to a lot of us long timer gamers.

While some dislike them, I think Goodman Games really succeeded with the use of “funky” dice in the game. I haven’t been that excited about dice for a long time. But with DCC RPG I enjoyed reading up on just what dice I needed and hunting them down on the Internet. I found the experience enjoyable and not all that difficult to do, despite what some folks seem to be saying.

For those that really want to try DCC RPG, but do not want to hunt down dice, the rulebook describe ways to emulate the “funky” dice with normal dice. We used this way of rolling for the first funnel adventure I played with my son. It worked well, certainly well enough to get a feel for the game.

Over on the Goodman Games forums for DCC RPG someone has shown a way to use only the d8, d10, and d12 in using this method:

  • d3 = d12 divided by four
  • d4 = d8 divided by two -or- d12 divided by three
  • d5 = d10 divided by two
  • d6 = d12 divided by two
  • d7 = d8 re-roll 8’s
  • d8 = standard
  • d10 = standard (I’m old and remember when it wasn’t)
  • d12 = standard
  • d14 = same as d7 but with a control die (high is +7)
  • d16 = d8 with an control die (high is +8)
  • d20 = d10 with a control die (high is +10)
  • d24 = d12 with a control die (high is +12)
  • d30 = d10 with a control die (middle is +10, high is +20)

While I prefer to roll the “funky” dice the above methods work as good substitutes as folks decide whether to purchase their own sets of “funky” dice.

In either case – do not let the “funky” dice or Zocchi dice keep you from trying out Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. Even if you do not feel like purchasing new dice for the game (and come on, what gamer doesn’t like to buy dice!), there are ways to play the game with “normal” dice we RPG gamers all used to.

The Jeweler That Dealt in Stardust

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On Monday night of this week I ran a Dungeon Crawl Classics one-shot via Google Hangouts and Tabletop Forge. I ran The Jeweler That Dealt in Stardust written by Harley Stroh from the Free RPG module this year. The adventure is a city based adventure and is for third level characters. I had the players pick from the six pregens posted on the Goodman Games forums.

Note: There might be slight spoilers below.

The adventure takes place in the city of Punjar, but could easily be dropped into any major city in your campaign setting of choice. The adventure centers around breaking into a house in the city of a known fence that worked out of a jeweler’s shop. He has not been seen for the past month and the underlife of the city are starting to think there might be untold riches within – should the fence not still be within.

Of the pregens, we ended up with a cutpurse wizard, scribe cleric, mercenary warrior, outlaw warrior, and the slave thief. There was no love for the Halfling vagrant. The group decided on their character names and quickly assumed the identities of their chosen characters.

Since this was a one-shot we cut right to the chase with the party assembling outside the jeweler’s shop in question. The night was dark and the rain was pouring down. With a brief look from outside the shop (a handout is included in the mod which helped in planning), the group decided to send their thief over the garden wall. He did not get far, the rain soaked wall proving to be quite the obstacle as he failed a check to get over the wall. With a little more planning and some rope and grappling hook the party was able to clamber over the wall into the garden beyond.

The group was forced to deal with a threat in the garden, which felt to me just the right level of threat to the five party group. A somewhat tough, but not over the top encounter. Once the party found a way into the jeweler’s shop a screaming trap that went undetected surely alerted any that were within the shop of their presence.

The group explored the first floor before working their way up. The thief proved his worth, though I won’t spoil too much of the module here. Let us just say if you happen to be playing this it is good to have a thief along!

The group continued their exploration of the house which went fairly smoothly. The module had just enough details and description to make it easy on the judge without overwhelming the judge with superfluous information.

The group reached what was the pinnacle encounter for the module and again, the encounter felt like it hit just the right spot. Players were able to play with their might deeds to try to accomplish their goal. It played out pretty well, though the group lost Randolpho, the mighty cutpurse wizard to this encounter.

It took about three hours to run this module over Google+ Hangouts. I rushed it along a bit towards the very end after the pinnacle encounter, but that was simply because it was getting late and folks had to work the next day.

This was a great adventure to run as a one-shot or drop into a longer running campaign. I had a lot of fun running it and I had positive feedback from all of the players.

Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG is really hitting a sweet spot with me right now. The old-school feel with what feels like new and fresh rules has been great. The adventures I have read so far have been easier to pickup and run than a lot of the Pathfinder modules or PFS scenarios I have run in the past. With The Jeweler That Dealt in Stardust I was able to spend a fairly short amount of time reading it over, getting a feel for it and running it successfully for a group.

I am looking forward to running and playing some more Dungeon Crawl Classics!

A Look At Tabletop Forge

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I have been following along with the development of Tabletop Forge since its early days when Joshuha Owen first started posting on Google+ about it. Tabletop Forge is a Google+ Hangout application that assists with playing tabletop RPGs via a Google+ Hangout. It includes mapping functions, whiteboard, dice rolling and integrated chat that allows aliasing and whispering.

I have played with several VTTs over the past few years. In the past I have tended to default to using MapTool and pairing with Skype for the voice end of things. MapTool is a fully featured VTT that when coupled with a framework for your system of choice is a pretty powerful VTT. Using a framework brings some complexity with the tool of course. Another possible con to MapTool is that one needs to host a server that the clients of the other players connect to over the Internet. For the technically inclined this is not a major issue, but for others it does cause troubles.

For those that are not aware, Google+ is haven of gamers. Do not buy the media headlines that Google+ is a ghost town, tap into the right circles and RPG gamers will find Google+ a wonderful home on the web for gamer discussion and meeting other gamers. Add in Google Hangouts for group communication and you start to have the makings of easy online gaming and an easy way to make connections with people that want to game online.

Then enters Tabletop Forge. As mentioned, it is an application that can be used from within a Google Hangout. There are not any servers to configure and setup and open holes in firewalls for. The application runs from within the Google Hangout and provides all the basics of a VTT application. It turns Google Hangouts into a one-stop shop for gaming online.

Tabletop Forge might not support all of the features that MapTool does, but it makes up for it in its simplicity and integration with Google Hangouts. The feature set for Tabletop Forge is growing and even in its current state provides everything to run games online.

I have toyed with Tabletop Forge a reasonable amount and found it easy to use and fully capable of running games via Google Hangouts. Most recently I played a game of Dungeon Crawl Classics over it. We primarily used it for display of images and for dice rolling. It handled the “funky” dice DCC RPG is famous for with ease. It did the job quite well and did not get in the way of the game.

I am prepping for a one-shot of DCC RPG which I am running via Google Hangouts which I will be using Tabletop Forge for. The game will primarily be Theater of the Mind, but I will also be using it for image display and dice rolling as well. The ability to draw up a few images if room descriptions are unclear will also be useful.

While I have talked about playing DCC RPG on Tabletop Forge, one of the things about Tabletop Forge is that it is system neutral. Choose your system and you have the basics to play a game on Google Hangouts with it.

Tabletop Forge currently has a Kickstarter running with about two weeks left to go. While Tabletop Forge is going to remain free, the Kickstarter will help enable the team to add some features and include some art packs with the tool. Plus it helps pay back the free time the current developers have put into it.

So swing on by Google+ and try out Tabletop Forge and see what it can do for your virtual gaming.

Review: Coliseum Morpheuon

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Authors:  Clinton Boomer, Jonathan McAnulty
Publisher:  Rite Publishing
Price:  Print – $31.49 / PDF $17.49 / Electronic Bundle $15.94
Pages:   122, Softcover
Tankard Rating:  5/5

Coliseum Morpheuon presented by Rite Publishing is a mini-campaign setting for the Pathfinder ruleset. It also includes a mini-adventure for 16th to 20th level characters. The setting is designed to be dropped into any campaign setting you may be using and details the Plane of Dreams. Regardless of whether you play in Golarion, your own homebrewed setting or any other published setting, Coliseum Morpheuon is easy to fit into an existing campaign world.

The setting covers the Plane of Dreams. The plane is ever-changing and one’s experience with the plane can easily vary from one trip to it to another. Gravity is subjective, time can be erratic, the environment can morph, yet magic tends to work normally – save for when it doesn’t.

The opening chapter of the book covers several of the regions of the plane with areas such as The Idle Isles of Daydream, The Ghoulish Cliffs, The Halls of Painted Heaven, The Slumbering Sea and more. Some attention is also paid to how one enters the Plane of Dreams.

Chapter Two covers the currency of dreams in the Plane of Dreams. In this realm dreams can almost be a form of currency separated in various levels depending on whether a dream is a Hope, Aspiration or Goal. Mechanically one can burn a dream much like one might use action or hero points in a game. Besides burning a dream a character can sacrifice a dream for greater effect, though this destroys the dream.

This chapter also includes several new traits for characters who enter the Plane of Dreams that relate to this new mechanic. For GMs that might feel dreamburning is too much for their game they also provide a short list of alternatives to dreamburning.

Chapter Three is dedicated to the Denizens one might find in the Plane of Dreams. This plan offers greater variety of life than most other planar realms. The book starts with covering the type of creatures, such as Constructs, Fey, Dragons, etc. Some brief information is given about each type, commonality and other tidbits of information. From here the chapter moves into specific creatures to the Plane of dreams with full bestiary style entries.

Chapter Four moves to cover The Island of The Coliseum Morpheuon. While the Plane of Dreams has a large number of changing environs the rest of the book focuses on this Island. The Khan of Nightmares oversees this island and it is legendary for its hosting of gladiatorial competitions that draw people from a myriad of locations.

The history of the island is discussed as well as the society of the island. More detail is given to the Great Coliseum that lives on the island and the various parts that make up the Coliseum. Later in the chapter some of the surrounding areas of the island are given some additional detail. The chapter closes with several additional adventure seeds for use by GMs planning to use the Plane of Dreams in some form.

Chapter Five provides a much closer look at the denizens of the Coliseum itself. This chapter does a good job of outlining how these denizens relate to each other and then much more detailed bestiary style entries appear later in the chapter.

Chapter Six contains an overview of the Epoch, an grand tournament that takes place at the Coliseum. This chapter provides some background, plot hooks to weave into the contest itself and information on the benefactors that the PCs may find themselves aligned with or struggling against.

The remaining chapters of the book are primarily related to the higher level adventure a GM can drop in to their campaign. From how the player characters receive their invitation, to the various tests and trials of the event and the last chapter addressing some of the secrets of the Coliseum to help the GM develop and engaging game.

And finally the Appendix includes two possible rival groups for the party to encounter during the tests and the third Appendix contains pre-generated characters.

I found the Coliseum Morpheuon a very engaging setting. One of the parts I really liked was that this mini-campaign can really be used in nearly any campaign setting you happen to be playing in. It does not matter whether you are running a game in Golarion, Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk or your own homebrew, there is room to drop this setting in to open up a whole new arena of play.

There are a lot of interesting campaign settings out there, but if you already have a game underway in one, it makes it difficult to do any real integration with another setting. But with Coliseum Morpheuon it can easily be used within a campaign you might already have running.

The included adventure also acts as a perfect end cap to an adventure path or any other long running campaign you might have wrapping up. As campaigns reach the winding down stage around 17th or 18th level the GM is often left with little option to continue another few levels. With the Plane of Dreams there is a whole new interesting area to explore, likely different than anything else the group has done before.

I also found the dreamburning mechanic interesting and different enough to add some spice to those later levels in campaigns. The thought of consuming your dreams for benefit or having dreams stolen was very intriguing and opened up several story ideas for me as I read about the concept.

A GM that was aware of this campaign setting could also easily work various side plots and such into their game even from the low levels. There are several ways to involve lower level characters into brief forays into the Plane of Dreams.

Overall I found this book a very good read. I believe it could provide a GM with an entire Plane to explore in –depth or simply provide a way for GMs to make brief excursions into the realm. The included adventure is a perfect way to cap off an adventure path once it has come to completion. So whether you use the mini-campaign setting in its entirety or in bits and pieces there is something for any GM to use.

The book is available in print and PDF at Paizo or Cubicle 7. A bundle option is available from DriveThruRPG that includes PDFs of Coliseum Morpheuon, four map packs, and paper minis.

Tankard Rating
5 tankards out of 5 tankards

Note: The Iron Tavern was provided a review copy of this book.

Dungeon Crawl Classics Related Kickstarters

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Last week I took a look at the new Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG from Goodman Games. Already this game has an active community over on the Goodman Games forums. People are putting out various character sheets, 0-level character creators, upper level character creators and the game is seeing some good 3PP support. I plan to take a closer look at some of these resources in a future post here at The Iron Tavern.

This week I wanted to look at a couple of Kickstarters that are out there to support the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. Each of the following Kickstarters has about two weeks remaining, so there is plenty of time to take a look at them and make a pledge to them.

First up we take a look at the The Crawler’s Companion from Purple Sorcerer Games. The Crawler’s Companion project is an attempt to bring a cool tool for DCC RPG players to tablets (iPad and ones running Android 2.2 or higher). This tool would be extremely useful to have at the gaming table and will provide the following features:

  • Funky Dice Roller: D3-D100 and everything in between
  • Critical Hit Charts: All player and monster charts
  • Failure Charts: Fumbles, corruptions, misfires, deity disapproval!
  • Rules Reference: Many topics available for quick reference.
  • Spell Reference and Resolution: Yep, they’re all there!
  • Multiple Modes: Have the program roll for you, or use it to quickly reference the charts based on your own physical dice rolling

The developer currently has this running in desktop PC application. The funds raised by the Kickstarter will simply help port the application to tablets for easier use at the gaming table. Even the lowest tier of funding provides a PDF of a Purple Sorcerer Game’s adventure. Checkout the project and take a look at the video.

The next project that has already met its initial goal and is moving quickly to meeting its stretch goals is one from Brave Halfling Publishing. They are looking to get a solid start in producing modules for Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG via this Kickstarter.

As this Kickstarter is already funded it is a very good deal to get several modules to help you get your Dungeon Crawl Classics game up and running! As of now this Kickstarter is giving you:

  • Appendix N Adventure Toolkit #1 : “The Ruins of Ramat”
  • Appendix N Adventure Toolkit #1 a: “The Witch of Wydfield”
  • Appendix N Adventure Toolkit #2 : “The Crumbling Tower”
  • Appendix N Adventure Toolkit #3 : “Danger in the Sulyndri Forrest.”
  • Appendix N Adventure Toolkit #4 : “The Revenge of Abudakar”
  • Appendix N Adventures Game Box

There is still one stretch goal not met yet, but it appears to be a great one if the project can meet this final stretch goal of $15,000 dollars. From the Brave Halfling Publishing Kickstarter page:

“Five years ago, I spent many months working with Gary Gygax on a unique campaign setting for his game, Lejendary Adventures. We shared back-and-forth almost daily about designing settings, npc races, magic item creation, divine beings, etc. Maps were created and art was commissioned. With Gary’s passing and the end of his game, I decided to not release this material. However, from the first time I got to read some of the early DCC RPG play-test material, I knew this campaign setting had found a new home! So my friends, if this kickstarter reaches $15,000, everyone who has pledged $20 or more will also receive a pdf copy and a print copy of, Appendix N Adventure Toolkit #5: “The Old Isle Campaign Setting.” This product will include a 11″ x 17″ color campaign map, a digest Player’s and Referee’s Guide. While all Appendix N Adventures are generic and can be placed into any campaign, they all do have specific locations in the Old Isle Setting.”

If you are just getting started with the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, these two Kickstarters offers some great tools to help you hit the ground running.

I Have the DCC RPG Hardcover!

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As I noted earlier this week in my brief look at the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, I decided having the PDF alone was not enough and tracked down a hardcover copy online and pieced together a set of “funky dice” to actually roll when I played.

Yesterday my book and dice arrived. Tonight I had a bit of time to take some pics of the book and the dice.

As you can tell I am pretty excited about the dice given the number of appearances they make in the pictures above! The book is massive and given the price is an excellent deal. The Koplow dice I pieced together from Troll and Toad are oversized. One day I will need to track down a matched set of a more normal size.

A Look at Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG

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Recently I have become interested in the Dungeon Crawl Classics by Goodman Games. I was aware of their beta playtest, but for the most part I ignored it. I am not real sure why I did not pay it more attention during the beta, but it never really made it any closer than the edge of my radar.

Fast forward just a bit and it the game started to get some activity on various forums and social media outlets as its release date drew nearer. Then people started posting they had received their PDF, then people started posting they had received their actual book. From there more review started happening and my curiosity grew.

I started reading a little more about it, EN World did a good review of it and I decided to look for it at Origins this year. I could not find the book there, so I purchased the PDF that weekend.

Initial thoughts are quite positive. The book is chock full of art and art from that early era of Dungeons and Dragons. The back cover has a quote that sums things up nicely “You’re no hero. You’re and adventurer…”

A group sitting down to play starts at level 0. You don’t start with just one level 0 character, but with three, four or even five characters. Why? Because many of them are going to die as they go through the funnel. The funnel is the adventure that gets ordinary people to go adventuring. Ill-equipped and with hardly anything to their name these adventurers go off to tackle the task at hand – maybe a few will survive. Those that do survive advance to first level where a class is chosen.

The game has the basic classes, Cleric, Thief, Warrior, Wizard, Dwarf (who is very similar to a warrior), Elf (who is like elves of old both martial and wizard in one), and Halfling who has some thief-like tendencies.

Magic is dangerous in this game. Casting even the simplest of spells carries some risk. This risk is what keeps magic from being too commonplace. Magic can corrupt you as the game goes on.

The game also uses funny looking dice. No. Not the funny looking dice we are all used to playing with. To us, d4’s, d12’s, and d20’s are common. DCC RPG uses things like the d3, d7, d14, d16, d24 and others. Dice that I actually did not have in my collection. I remember opening my Basic D&D Box set many years ago and the fond memories of seeing such unique dice. Somehow Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG was able to recapture that feeling.

I intend to take a closer look at Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG in a future posting, so let me move on into my early foray into the game. My son and I (the same one that has GM’ed some Pathfinder) generated up three 0-level characters each to see what that experience was like. It went quite quickly.

Generating characters with truly random stats and such was very refreshing! No agonizing over where to place your ability score points, just let the dice fall the way they will. None of our characters were very extraordinary, but I think we each had our favorite we were hoping to see survive.

Yeah, fat chance of that! We tackled the first adventure included in the book. Being used to more modern games where you characters are “supposed” to survive, six characters felt like plenty.

When we reached the second room and saw two characters die right away we quickly realized we might not have enough characters with us. I think we made it to about the fourth room before we TPK’ed. We loved it. We had a blast playing even if it did result in all of our newly created characters dying.

So this weekend I tracked down a copy of the hardback book (which was harder than one would think) and ordered two sets of those “funny” looking dice. I can’t wait for them to arrive later this week.

If you hold some nostalgia for your initial forays into gaming and those initial forays were back in the late 70’s or early 80’s you need to check Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG out. There will be some fun times ahead!

Mini Review: Pathfinder Lite PDFs

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Paizo announced yesterday that they have released “Lite” versions of their hardcover rulebooks and Inner Sea World Guide in PDF format. The products released in this manner are:

These versions of the PDFs are created with the idea of being tablet or netbook friendly. Paizo has achieved this by simplifying and compressing the background in the PDFs and other minor export options to help speed them up on mobile devices.

As tablets have seen increasing use at the game table this has been a frequent cry heard on the Paizo forums to release the PDFs in a lighter format. The originally release PDFs have more intensive backgrounds and layers which often caused for slower rendering on tablet type devices (and even lower end laptops). Finally, Paizo has found a way that they are happy with to keep the quality of their product and answer the pleas for lighter weight PDFs.

Before I delve into how these new Lite PDFs perform, let me go over my current PDF reading setup and past performance.

I use a first generation iPad for a good portion of my gaming materials these days. I use it for notes, the occasional dice roller, web access and of course PDFs. I use GoodReader for my PDF reader on the iPad. It has some excellent features including Dropbox integration, annotation abilities, custom bookmarks, tabbed PDFs and with its read-ahead caching can provide a performance boost when reading PDFs synchronously.

Reading Paizo PDFs on the iPad generally has worked well. GoodReader caches the next page so at a normal reading pace things flow smoothly. The problem historically has been when you want to jump from section to section within a PDF, say as one might do at a game table. Here the delays were much more noticeable with the page redraw taking a second or two. For the most part this led me to hope I wouldn’t need to reference the PDF too much during game play because of these delays.

Granted, some of these cons were taken in stride when with the iPad I could carry my entire Pathfinder book collection in one slim device. It made attending conventions much easier on the back than it used to be and freed up room for snacks in the backpack! Still, I was certainly one of the people hoping for a less heavy PDF of the various Paizo products for the iPad.

This morning I loaded up several of the new Lite PDFs on my same iPad with the same PDF reader software. I worked with the Advanced Players Guide, Bestiary 2 and 3, Ultimate Magic and Ultimate Combat. They all worked quite well on my iPad. The page turns were smooth, I could jump around using the Table of Contents with speed and then page forward and backward from that spot with minimal delay.

The Lite versions of the PDF are definitely much improved over their heavier weight PDFs I had been using of the same books. I still need to see how they do at a full game session, but I suspect this week I will be leaving my hardcover books at home on the shelf and just relying on the iPad this week.

This is one of the many reasons so many gamers really feel Paizo really gets us gamers. Paizo already had my money for all of the PDFs in question. They aren’t really making anything more from me by releasing these lighter weight versions of the PDF as I already owned them. But they listened to their customer, found a way to release these PDFs in a manner which met their production standards and ran more smoothly on the ever growing number of tablets at the gaming table.  Thanks Paizo for listening!

Tankard Rating

5 tankards out of 5 tankards