D&D Planescape Resource – The Book of Doors and Keys

The Foundry Tower

One of the central mysteries of my Erlendheim campaign was the PCs’ hometown. Dor’s Hill stood out like a boil on the perfect skin of an elf. The town stood atop a tall hill in the exact middle of the island of Erlendheim, surrounded by plains and forests. There was something else about it that was odd. A legend, or false history existed, indicating that, many generations ago, a number of very different people appeared in the vicinity of the hill, supposedly sent by the islanders’ primary deity, Helm, to act as guardians of the island. The native people were humans with a Nordic type of culture. The new people that appeared also included humans, though very different to the Erlendheimers, but there were also the goat-like Bariaur, a contingent of Githzerai and several Tieflings too. The legend told that they built the town of Dor’s Hill on top of the hill and swore to live in peace with the people of the island while acting to protect it at the behest of Helm.

As usual with such stories, there were elements of truth mixed into this largely fabricated tale. It was mostly made up or confused or deliberately mis-told over the centuries. In fact, the hill never existed prior to the coming of the new people. Because they arrived in it. It was a building, formerly of the city of Sigil, at the centre of the Outer Planes. It was the old headquarters of the Faction known as the Believers of the Source, or the Godsmen. It had been plane-shifted to the island by one of the Factions’ great rivals, along with everyone in it. When the Godsmen found themselves on Erlendheim, they also found there was no way back. So, rather than despair, they set themselves up on the island, allying themselves with the locals and assimilating.

The Foundry Tower, as it was known while situated in Sigil, had been rather brimming over with portals to other places and planes of existence. It had been renowned for being the most portal-dense building in a city filled with such portals. In Sigil, any door, window, pipe-opening, sewer grate or picture frame could also be home to a portal. You just had to know the key to activate it. So, although the PCs discovered the tower under the hill and uncovered the fact that it was home to dozens of portals that still worked, they had no way to activate them without some guide to the keys required. And they had to find them because the Druid’s kids had been kidnapped and transported through one of the doors. After losing access to the only extant copy of the book describing the keys on the island, they had no choice but to travel to Sigil in the hopes of finding another copy. So that’s what they did, through an underwater backdoor portal that happened to exist off the coast, conveniently.

Now, the fun thing about the doors in the City of Doors, was that the keys needed to open them could be almost anything, from a verse of poetry to the lost sword of a dead king. As a result, I thought I would let my imagination run wild with the keys needed for the doors in the tower. It turned out I didn’t need most of theses. I think they only ended up entering two or three of them in total, but it was still a fun exercise and I think it could stand to me in the future if I ever have another Planescape adjacent campaign.

So, as a break from the Erlendheim Character Options series, I thought I would present here “The Book of Doors and Keys.” If you can get any use out of this in your own Planescape campaign, that’s great! You may even be able to use them for some other purposes, I guess.

Bear in mind that the “Door” entries are specific to a map I was using for the tower. I’m not going to present it here as I think its usefulness to others is negligible, so you can just ignore those.

Also, please note that any destination with “Scatterhome” in it is from my own home-brew world, so you can safely substitute it for some other place.

The Book of Doors and Keys

Door: Doorway in Level 1, Room 3
Destination: Nidavellir, Ysgard
Key: The thought of your most beloved person

Door: Eastern Doorway in Level 1, Room 6
Destination: Abellio, Arcadia
Key: Eat a plate of ribs at the doorway

Door: Doorway in Level 1, Room 10
Destination: Dothion, Bytopia
Key: Turnip

Door: Doorway in Level 1, Room 11
Destination: Pandemonium
Key: Be drunk

Door: Doorway in Level 1, Room 13
Destination: The Shadowfell
Key: Whisper a secret to someone else which will make them think less of you

Door: Doorway in Level 1, Room 16
Destination: Para-elemental Plane of Smoke
Key: Smoke a strong joint

Door: Doorway in Level 1, Room 18
Destination: Chaste, Vitrean Empire, Scatterhome
Key: A symbol of Kaigun, God of the Sea, from a dead priest

Door: Well near Level 1, Room 20
Destination: Mechanus
Key: A gear from a magical construct from Sigil

Door: Doorway in Level 1, Room 22
Destination: Goldenfields, The Sword Coast, Faerûn
Key: A red ribbon tied into a knot

Door: Well near Level 1, Room 24
Destination: The Caverns of Thought, The Outlands
Key: The memory of a parent that is the most enraging

Door: Doorway in Level 1, Room 26
Destination, The Elemental Plane of Fire
Key: Dragon-breath

Door: Doorway in Level 1, Room 31
Destination: The Nords, The Outlands
Key: Crush a bunch of peck-berries (only obtainable from the Fae-wild) under foot before the door

Door: Doorway in Level 1, Room 33
Destination: Aquallor, Arborea
Key: Whistle the tune to the Hymn of the Mother

Door: Doorway in Level 2, Room 1
Destination: Elemental Plane of Air
Key: Eat a turtle cake and burp in the doorway

Door: North Archway leading to the statue of a Githzerai in Level 2, Area 2
Destination: The Astral Plane
Key: Break a bottle of healing potion in the doorway

Door: South Archway leading to the sculpture of a great palace in Level 2, Area 2
Destination: The Factol’s Palace, The Ethereal Plane
Key: Tell someone a secret that will cause emotional harm to them

Door: Doorway in Level 2, Room 4
Destination: Tír na nÓg, The Outlands
Key: Tell a joke

Door: Doorway in Level 2, Room 5
Destination: Khalas, Gehenna
Key: Stab yourself in the leg and spread the blood across the door before the doorway

Door: Northern Archway in Level 2, Room 6
Destination: Strixhaven University
Key: Frustration

Door: Doorway in Level 2, Room 8
Destination: Neverwinter, The Sword Coast, Faerûn
Key: Dance the Neverwinter Axe-dance

Door: Doorway in Level 2, Room 9
Destination: The Infinite Beerhall, Demiplane of Celebration
Key: Put a sausage somewhere it does not belong in front of the doorway

Door: Doorway in Level 2, Room 11
Destination: Elemental Plane of Water
Key: Speak the name of the person you would most like to have sex with

Door: Doorway in Level 2, Room 13
Destination: Malbolge, The Nine Hells
Key: Burn a book and throw it through the doorway

Door: Doorway in Level 2, Room 14
Destination: Minethys, Carceri
Key: Inscribe an arch around the doorway with the tip of a steel sword

Door: Doorway in Level 2, Room 15
Destination: The deepest dungeon of the Imperial Palace in Vitrea, Scatterhome
Key: Cut off a left hand and place it in the doorway

Door: Doorway in Level 3, Room 1
Destination: Krigala, The Beastlands
Key: Throw a beast’s tooth through the doorway

Door: Double doorway, Level 3, Room 3
Destination: The Arena, The City-state of Tyr, The Tablelands, Athas
Key: The tortoise blade of a Mul Gladiator left in the doorway

Door: Doorway in Level 3, Room 4
Destination: the Feywild
Key: Play the pan-pipes in front of the door

Door: Doorway in Level 3, Room 8
Destination: The Positive Energy Plane
Key: Roll two sixes on a pair of dice

Door: North Doorway of Level 3, Room 10
Destination: Krangath, Gehenna
Key: Wear a crown

Door: West Doorway in Level 3, Room 13
Destination: The Opera House, Rath an Croí, Scatterhome
Key: Place a diamond in the doorway

Door: Doorway in Level 3, Room 12
Negative Quasielemantal Plane of Ash
Key: A handful of Yugoloth ash poured on your head

Door: Doorway in Level 3, Room 15
Destination: Amoria, Elysium
Key: Pay a compliment to the person you find it most difficult to compliment

Door: East Doorway in Level 3, Room 16
Destination: Niflheim, Hades
Key: Cry genuine tears of sorrow

Door: Doorway in Level 3, Room 17a
Destination: Mercurua, Mount Celestia
Key: Tell a sad story in celestial

Door: Doorway in Level 3, Room 17b
Destination: The Mortuary, the Hive, Sigil
Key: Crush a cranium rat’s brain in your hand

Door: Doorway in Level 3, Room 17c
Destination: Limbo
Key: The memory of your most embarrassing moment

Door: Doorway in Level 3, Room 20
Destination: Avalas, Acheron
Key: Burn your skin and allow the heat from the burn to kill an insect

New Character Options from Erlendheim, Part 3

Erlendheim

I began a series of posts last week detailing the character options I introduced to my Planescape flavoured D&D campaign a few years ago. It was quite epic in scale and involved gods and legendary monstrosities and elemental powers as well as travelling across multiple planes of existence and saving the universe from the domination of a narcissistic sea spirit. I hadn’t planned it in advance but, at one point, the Warlock needed to switch her patron so I came up with a new one which you can read about here. After that, I was hooked. I started making new character options, features and powers for every PC in the party. You know when you max out your rep with your party members in CRPGs like Dragon Age and Mass Effect and they get access to new abilities? That’s the way I was thinking of it. As a result, these new character options were designed with our specific players, characters, shared world and story in mind. I left balance at the door. Balance was not relevant to what I wanted to achieve. In fact, I wanted the PCs to feel special, powerful and impacted in a very concrete way by the events of the campaign. I think I largely achieved that. Take a look, here, at the powers I gave the party’s Druid when he became a kind of a shitty god. I think it exemplifies my philosophy when designing these abilities.

Celebrating the Mundane

I think the next big character advancement arc to culminate was that of Xarune, our Githzerai Fighter. Xarune, despite his background as an adventurer in his younger days, had a solid view of the world. He believed in the shield in his hand, the guardsman at his side and the firmness of the ground beneath his feet. He had developed a dependable reputation in a position of some responsibility as a sergeant in the Yeomanry of the town of Dor’s Hill. Magic was anathema to him and, indeed, he went to extremes to explain away magical phenomena in entirely mundane terms. But then the ground beneath his feet turned out to be the ancient tower of an unknown faction from a city in the shape of a donut floating above the top of an infinitely tall spire at the centre of the Outer Planes. It became increasingly difficult for him to hand-wave the obvious magic in the world around him, especially once he ended up in Sigil. In fact, I instituted a special mechanic, specific to Xarune. Each time he witnessed something truly magical that he could not explain, he would roll a Wisdom Saving Throw. When he failed, he lost a point of Wisdom, making it more-and-more likely that he would fail with each successive failed save. My goal here was to get Xarune under 10 Wisdom. Once that happened, his aura of confusion and his inability to square his beliefs with the facts of reality brought him to the attention of a small, new Faction in Sigil. They were called the Mundane. When Xarune ran into their leader, another Githzerai warrior named Sarafem, who noticed his unique state of disorientation through her natural psychic abilities. We had another short mini-game at this point, after Sarafem introduced the Faction and its tenets. She presented to him her shield, with, emblazoned upon it, the emblem of a shield. She asked him to take and examine it.

Here is how I presented Xarune’s inner struggle in my notes:

Sarafem will encourage Xarune to use detect thoughts while examining the shield. In essence, this will allow Xarune to detect his own thoughts, to interrogate his own beliefs.
If he does so, he will replay some of the more recent encounters he has had with “magic.” Ask him to recount them and indicate that he is unable, in retrospect, to lie to himself and his own feelings. The truth is that the spells and magical effects did happen. In some cases he was able to shrug off the effects and in others he bore the full brunt of them. What becomes clear as he remembers these incidents is that, it is not objectively true that he or anything has to be subject to such effects. He begins to get so in touch with his feelings that he feels a new understanding blossom. He is able to apply the force of his will against this magic, a will that is every bit as strong as any wizard or demon thinks they are. For that is all it is in the end, a battle of wills.
He will want to fail his saving throw against detect thoughts. Give him three chances to fail it at various points through the process. Of course, it is a Wisdom saving throw but this time the DC will be 2 points higher than Xarune’s normal DC as it gains a bonus from the shield.
Whether he succeeds or fails, Sarafem will present to him the shield with a bow. It is a mundane +2 shield. There is nothing magical about it, but it is exceptionally well made from the hardest, lightest wood they have ever seen. (It is made of what she calls Steadfast.)
If he fails, with a barely perceptible twinkle in her eye she will ask him to join her budding faction, which she calls, “The Mundane.” She says they are still workshopping it. There are not many of them so far, but each of them has a very firm grasp of their true feelings and they know what is real. If he decides to take her up on her offer, they are usually to be found meeting in her house near the Statue of Bigby in the Lady’s Ward any evening.
Also, he will regain his lost points of Wisdom and he will gain the new abilities presented [in the section below]
If he succeeds, however, he will go on as before, he will not regain any points of Wisdom and he will continue to risk losing them. If he ever reaches 0 Wisdom, he will lose his mind completely and reject reality entirely, thus becoming an NPC.
However, he can continue to attempt the trick with the shield, trying to detect his own thoughts. He can do this whenever he has downtime using the same rules as are presented above.

Thankfully, he failed all his saves and his outlook and philosophy changed as a result. Not completely, it was still quite compatible with his no-magic stance from before, it just morphed into a more anti-magic one, bringing a few new abilities with it. And you can read about those below.

But that wasn’t all. Xarune’s player, Isaac, took the idea of the Mundane and ran with it. He quickly took the ideals of the Faction and began to codify them, even going so far as to write up a Mundane Manifesto! This did my withered old heart good to see. The campaign gave his character a concrete, mechanical advancement directly related to Xarune and the way he played him, and he gave back to the campaign and the world, adding to its story and its depth. Sigh so good.

New Fighter Features – Nullification (Anti-magic)

Erlendheim #DND

So, as I pointed out in the intro to this post, I created these features and options for, not only a specific class, but for a particular character. As a result, the features prestented below are unique to Xarune’s flavour of Fighter, a Battle Master who focused on using the Defense and Protection Fighting Styles. As always, if you think you could make use of any of this stuff, please feel free.

Fighting Style

Defense

Also add a +1 bonus to saving throws against magical effects

Protection

In addition to the regular advantage of this fighting style, if a creature you can see casts a spell that requires a saving throw against a target other than you within 5 ft of you, you can use your reaction to add your shield’s AC bonus (including magical or other bonuses if it has them) to their saving throw.

Martial Archetypes

Battle Master

Maneuvers

Deny

When another creature hits you with a spell attack or you fail a saving throw against a spell effect or magical effect, as a reaction you can expend a superiority die and reduce the amount of damage you take by the superiority die roll + Con modifier.

Reflect

When another creature hits you with a spell attack, as a reaction you can expend a superiority die to reflect the superiority die roll + Con modifier damage back at the spell caster.

Wake-up Call

When you take the attack action on your turn you can forego one of your attacks and instead use a bonus action to direct another creature who can hear you to make an immediate saving throw against a spell that they are currently affected by. You expend a superiority die and they can add the roll + your Con mod to their saving throw roll.

Indomitable

In addition to the regular benefits of this feature, starting at 9th level, if the Nullifying Fighter is subject to a magic spell or effect, they can roll any saving throw with advantage.

New Character Options from Erlendheim Part 1

D&D Superheroes

There’s no doubt in my mind that the creators of the current version of D&D meant to make the PCs into superheroes. This goes for 5E 2014 as well as 2024.

You can have opinions about this. There are times when it frustrates the hell out of me as a DM just trying to introduce potentially deadly situations to our games. I usually overestimate the lethality of these situations, whether they might be traps, encounters or particularly difficult episodes of exploration. The players normally trounce these situations readily. They always have a feature or a spell or a power or a magic item or a special friend who will come to their rescue so that they emerge largely unscathed and only further emboldened. On the other hand, I do feel bad when a PC dies in one of my campaigns. I mean, of course! They spent hours designing and imagining and embodying this person… and they died… it can be devastating. It should be devastating. Not just for the player in question, but for every player in the game, including the DM. So I get it. I understand why the average D&D PC’s life expectancy has sky-rocketed in the last couple of decades. I also understand that if you want something more lethal, Troika! is right there. So, if you want more lethal play, there are plenty of options.

Anyway, when I finally realised the superheroness of the characters, we were playing one of my long-time RPG group’s more iconic campaigns. It was called Erlendheim and it was based on my home-brew world of Scatterhome. Here’s the TLDR for the campaign:

The PCs were all former adventurers living in or around their hometown of Dor’s Hill on the island of Erlendheim. The island was surrounded by a terrible and eternal storm meaning no-one could leave and no-one new ever turned up. The PCs started at level 8, but their adventuring days were behind them. Until one day, they were asked by the powers that be in Dor’s Hill to investigate some strange reports from an outlying fishing village. While they were off fighting what turned out to be Yugoloth fiends there, all six of the Druid’s kids were kidnapped by some more extraplanar beings. This, eventually and after much adventuring, roleplaying, schmoozing and drama, led them to Sigil, The City of Doors, The Cage. For the uninitiated, Sigil is the city at the centre of the Outlands, the plane at the centre of the Outer Planes in the D&D cosmology.

Now, as a die-hard AD&D 2nd Edition player of old, I was a massive fan of the original Planescape setting, the new shit it introduced to the game and the way it expanded our horizons as both DM and players when it came out in the nineties. But, I’ll be honest, I don’t think I knew how to use it as a 14 or 15 year old DM. It was just too massive. I wrote and ran adventures that were pretty much standard AD&D adventures except in a place in the Outlands instead of on the bog-standard fantasy world I had devised. So, in 2021, when I got the chance to send these PCs to Sigil!!! I grabbed that bull by both horns. It was so much better than I could have hoped. Even just the act of getting there was a major campaign milestone. And before long, both the players and the characters were knee-deep in planar weirdness. They didn’t know it, they didn’t understand most of it, but they still had goals. They were there for a reason (they had to find a book that explained the keys to all the planar doors in a mysterious tower beneath the town of Dor’s Hill back home.) So they pursued that. On the way, they all gained even more super powers than they already possessed. Why? Because, once you understand that D&D 5E is a superhero game, it’s a good idea to lean into it.

The first PC to get blessed in this manner was our warlock, Yulla (played by Tom.) Now, it just so happened that Yulla, up until this point, had a patron named Aegir, an elemental spirit that turned out to be the baddest guy of the entire campaign. So, when she went to Sigil her confidence in their patronage had taken a few knocks. When she then discovered her long lost, presumed dead parents there she was open to new possibilities. Now I was using the gorgeous, unimpeachable original version of the Planescape setting for this game. It was made for AD&D 2nd Edition but that was no impediment at all. (When I got the new 5E version I was a little shocked and affronted to find that they had done away with one of my favourite Sigil factions, the Believers of the Source. I understand that this actually happened way back in one of the nineties Planescape novels but I never read those so I had no way of knowing.) Anyway, the entirety of my Erlendheim campaign had been built around the Believers, their doctrines, their headquarters, etc. And it turned out that Yulla’s birth-parents had been members of the believers for decades since their supposed deaths. Anyway, this led Yulla to seek the Source as a patron, instead of the untrustworthy and, frankly quite evil Aegir.

And this is where the extra super powers come in. Tom and I designed a new Warlock Patron for Yulla, the Source itself. I based it around the philosophy of the Believers: you must try to reach your potential, your existence should be evolved as much as possible within your own lifetime, etc. Here is the result. If you like the look of it and you can find a way or reason to use this in your own campaign, please feel free.

New Warlock Patron – The Source V 2.1

Description

You have have made a pact with the ultimate creative and destructive power in the multiverse. The Source is that from which all things come and which all will someday rejoin. The members of Sigil’s faction, The Believers of the Source understand that all beings should be striving to evolve within their lifetimes to become one with the Source. To this patron, time and space have little meaning; sentients are beings of pure potential and a deep understanding of the planes of existence is essential.

Expanded Spell List

Spell Level	Spells
1st	Find Familiar, Inflict Wounds
2nd	Wither and Bloom, Vortex Warp
3rd	Motivational Speech, Life Transference
4th	Aura of Life, Vitriolic Sphere
5th	Destructive Wave, Legend Lore

Features

1st Level Feature

Burst of Potential

From 1st level, as an action the warlock becomes a silhouette of themselves and emits a brief burst of soft yellow light. They draw on a fraction of the unlimited potential of the Source and grant it to those allies in a ten foot cube around them. Until the end of the Warlock’s next turn all within the aura gain advantage on a single ability check, attack roll or saving throw of their choice.
Once you use this feature you cannot use it again until you finish a short or long rest.

1st Level Feature

Fragment of the Source

From 1st level, using a bonus action, the Warlock of the Source gains the ability to summon a fragment of the Source in the shape of a softly glowing orb. It will appear at a chosen point anywhere within 60ft of the Warlock. The Fragment of the Source will remain for a number of rounds equal to the Warlock’s Charisma modifier. The Fragment can use its potential energy to allow a creature within 5 feet of it to roll with advantage or force a creature within 5 feet of it to roll with disadvantage on any attack roll, saving throw or ability check. As a bonus action on their turn, the Warlock can move the Fragment up to thirty feet. The Warlock can summon the Fragment a number of times equal to their proficiency bonus and regains all expended uses when they finish a long rest. The Fragment of the Source will act on the same initiative as the Warlock.

6th Level Feature

Aura of Potential

From 6th level, the Warlock of the Source’s Burst of Potential feature becomes an aura. The effects are the same as the Burst but apply to each ally that starts their turn in the aura. Also, the effect can be used to ensure maximum damage on an attack roll.
The Aura of Potential lasts a number of rounds equal to the Warlock’s Charisma modifier.
Once you use this feature you cannot use it again until you finish a short or long rest.

6th Level Feature

Wasted Potential

From 6th Level, as a reaction, the Warlock of the Source may fire a sparkling yellow orb at any creature taking an action, making an attack roll or rolling a saving throw within a 30ft range. The creature must make a Charisma saving throw against the Warlock’s spell save DC or apply disadvantage to their roll.

10th Level Feature

Mark of Potential

From 10th Level, the Warlock of the Source begins to gain benefits from the potential bestowed or denied by the Aura of Potential and Wasted potential features. Each time an ally succeeds on a roll which benefits from the advantage bestowed by the Aura of Potential the Warlock gains a Mark of Potential. Each time a creature fails on a roll affected by Wasted Potential, the Warlock gains a Mark of Potential. Gained Marks spark briefly into being around the Warlock’s head before fading into invisibility.
At 10th level the Warlock can hold up to a maximum of nine Marks of Potential. At 14th level the Warlock can hold up to ten Marks of Potential (See the “Evolution” feature below for how ten marks can be spent.)
The appearance of the Marks is up to the individual Warlock.
Marks of Potential may be held until spent.
Marks of Potential can be used in the following ways:

Marks Spent	Effect 1	Effect 2	Effect 3
1	Apply advantage to any attack roll, saving throw or ability check	Double the range of Fragment of Potential
2	Roll a hit die plus your Charisma modifier to regain hit points
3	Maximise any damage effect	Induce a critical success
4	Roll two hit dice plus your Charisma modifier to regain hit points
5	Double the area of Aura of Potential	Double the number of targets affected by Wasted Potential	Double the number of Fragments of Potential Summoned
6	Roll three hit dice plus your Charisma modifier to regain hit points
7	Increase the casting level of any appropriate spell by one
8	Roll four hit dice plus your Charisma modifier to regain hit points
9	Regain a Spell Slot

14th Level Feature

Evolution

At 14th level the Warlock of the Source gains the ability to use ten Marks of Potential to evolve into a form which brings them closer to the Source for a number of rounds equal to the Warlock’s Charisma modifier. For each level the Warlock gains above 14th, the duration of the evolution is increased by one round.
In their evolved form, the Warlock gains the following features:

5 hit dice plus Charisma modifier of temporary hit points
Makes all attack rolls, ability checks and saving throws with advantage
Triples the area of Aura of Potential

The appearance of the evolved form is up to the individual Warlock.
Once you use this feature you cannot use it again until you finish a long rest.

The Theatre of Trophy Gold

Getting my flash in

Orlen, dusty, wide-brimmed chapeau drowning her alarming eyes in shadow, holds aloft her trophy, beaming. The bag of coin, pleasingly hefty, dangling from her dextrous digits. “‘Aah ‘baht ‘at ‘en?” Her companions, ensorcelled by something above her sturdy, sinister shoulder, point. A hiss, as a punctured bladder, sounds in her ear. Speculative, her left hand shoots up, ready to throttle the looming serpent. It narrowly misses losing its ring finger as a dagger, recently released by Rasei, skewers the snake to the formerly coin-concealing statue. Orlen chances a glance. The cold blood dribbles down the stone man’s shoulder, over the sickle he holds dramatically crossing his sword over his chest. Nima cries, “More snakes!” Time to go. The treasure hunters scarper down the path of the sickle, ignoring the sword’s point and the keep slouching beyond it on the horizon, hoping for Hester’s Mill.

A dramatic retelling of the opening scene of our recent game of Trophy Gold, run by friend of the blog, Isaac. To those who were there, apologies. I’m sure I got a few details wrong, either deliberately or by mistake. Drama seems appropriate for this fascinating game, defined as it is, within Sets.

Trophy

So, as you probably know, dear reader, if you have been with me for a while, here on the dice pool dot com, I am a more-or-less avid listener of the Fear of a Black Dragon podcast from the Gauntlet. I wrote a post on my appreciation for it and the Indie RPG Podcast last Summer. Our path to playing this incursion (as Trophy scenarios are called) leads very much from that. Jason Cordova, one of the podcast’s capable hosts, rarely ventures into the OSR’s hex-defined landscapes. Rather, you can generally find him in the narrative woods and trails of story-based games. On the podcast, he often discusses his experiences in running OSR (or just old tbh) modules in other systems. Back in the olden days of Fear of a Black Dragon, this generally meant either the incredibly rules-lite World of Dungeons or Dungeon World My last post on this blog was about the feelings Dungeon World made me feel. Go and have a look!) These both have PBTA DNA. Their mechanics lend themselves more to the application of imagined narrative than cut-and-dried, D&D-esque, result-binary systems. And this is really only because of the inclusion of a third option, a mixed success, or success at a cost. Since the implied consequence cannot be defined outside the context of the situation, it is usually left up to those at the table to invent it (although Dungeon World generally provides far more pre-written options than does the baldly efficient text of World of Dungeons.) And look, if you’re a PBTA maven, my deepest apologies for what is, no doubt, a faintly condescending and largely inaccurate paring down of a game system that is probably the most influential in the indie game space of the last decade and a half. But if you were raised on a distilled diet of Borgs in your old schools, you’re welcome.

I have gotten off track. The point I was trying to get to was that, a few years ago, Jason switched to running pretty much every module in Trophy Dark or Trophy Gold instead. Mostly Trophy Gold, in fact. Obviously, this got me very interested in the game. The idea of running D&D style modules in a more narrative style highlights a whole new facet of the hobby that I always thought would be very fun to explore. And, after reading a bit about the game and learning of its mechanical descent from Blades in the Dark I wanted to try it even more. It just turns out that, much like Tom (with Dungeon World,) before him, Isaac got there before me. I’m not complaining. I love being a player in these games.

So, to put it briefly, both Trophy games were written by Jesse Ross and published by Gauntlet Publishing. Elements of the rules have been adapted from Blades in the Dark by John Harper, who is also responsible for World of Dungeons and other elements were cribbed from Graham Walmsley’s seminal Cthulhu Dark. They are games about treasure hunters going out into the dark forest to find gold and bring it home so they can continue to survive in a hostile world. In Trophy Dark, your vile little adventurer is a goner; you’re not making it past the end of the session. Sorry. That’s the point of Trophy Dark. But in Trophy Gold you make a treasure hunter who might live to the end of the incursion if you’re lucky. They might even weasel their way through to another one. Speaking of which, I wrote a blog post about making a Trophy Gold character last summer. You may find it illuminating if you’re interested. Do bear in mind, though, the game I used in that post is not quite the same as the one presented in the book published in 2022. I used the game from the Codex Gold magazine, which you can pick up for a steal over on Drivethru. I don’t think there are any really drastic rule changes but we noticed some discrepancies in a few of the tables.

A gold and black illustration of an adventurer being lowered on a rope into a dark cave where a giant spider awaits. the cover is framed by stylised black spiders on a gold background. The words, Codex, The Gauntlet's monthly RPG zine appear in the top left of the cover. — The cover of Codex Gold from Gauntlet Publishing

Hester’s Mill

So, what’s all this about Sets? You didn’t think I remembered mentioning that earlier, did you, dear reader? Well, Incursions are formatted in a very particular way. Trophy Gold helpfully breaks it up and introduces the format like this:

Theme – much like any dramatic work that might be presented on the stage, a Trophy Gold incursion should be built around a theme, even if you are adapting it from another type of module. I would call the broad theme of Hester’s Mill to be “Harvest”
Sets – these are particular locations in which the treasure hunters will be presented with clear goals. I find it fascinating that the rules tell the GM to make the goal explicit to the players. I’m not giving away too much by telling you that the goal in the opening Set I wrote up in the intro is to find the way to Hester’s Mill. You complete the Set by achieving this goal and this is eminently important to the cycle of play. You may not wish to complete the goal of every Set. It might not be clever or necessary for you. Your character’s overall goal is to earn enough Gold to relieve them of their Burden, both of which are abstract scores on the character sheet. In other words, you know from the start how much you need to take home so you don’t die on the streets or get consumed by the evils of the world. I don’t think anyone would blame you for trying to convince the party to get the heck out of there once you had managed to collect enough money. But, just because you got your Benjamins, doesn’t mean everyone else did. This can lead to inter-personal conflict, unsurprisingly. But it might also lead to moments of support and kindness in these Sets. Drama, gettit? And guess what you call the things you find within the Sets… Yep, Props. It’s obvious, really. So the statue of the man with the sickle and sword in the intro? Yep, that’s a Prop. You also have Treasure and Traps as defined elements within Sets
Flowchart – What the holy business-process, Batman? Yep, it makes so much sense, when you think about it. When you are trying to play something like an OSR module, you might have a map which visually represents the location but that does not necessarily represent the decisions, actions and repercussions that might lead the PCs from one Set to the next. In many ways, the Flowchart is the more useful of the two. I’d like to give it a go in any game where I’m running a particular scenario, honestly. Not very theatrical though, disappointingly
Monsters – these are specifically mentioned because the section I am referring to in the Trophy Gold rules from Codex Gold is there to explain how you might convert an OSR module to be played using Trophy Gold instead. So, Jesse Ross has helpfully provided a lot of advice on converting Monsters, a staple of the genre, to be used in that system. One of the most fascinating aspects of the game is that the monsters do not come pre-named. That is left up to the party. This can be either cool AF or disastrous. The monsters we encountered in Hester’s Mill so far have been both bonkers and horrifying. And if it had been left up to me, they would have been called something stupid
Magic – Similar to Monsters, this includes advice on conversion. But, I will say that there is a very useful table of already converted D&D style spells presented in the rules for you to use.

Anyway, it should be clear that the Set is the main denomination of organisational structure within an Incursion. So far, I think we have interacted with three or four Sets in Hester’s Mill and achieved the Goal in two or three of them. You can use another highly abstracted currency, the Hunt Token, to complete a Set without having to actually face its dangers. You can receive (and also lose) these tokens on a Hunt Roll, one of the three types of rolls in the game. If you spend three Hunt Tokens like that, you simply draw the curtain across the stage and open again on the next Set and get to work on the new goal.

In general, rolls, of which you have Hunt, Combat and Risk, are made using a dice pool mechanic much like that used in Blades in the Dark. The D6 is the only die you need but you will need them in Dark and Light varieties. You will always roll a Dark Die in Combat and you can roll one to give you a better chance of success on a Risk Roll if you’re willing to risk mind or body… More drama.

The Combat Roll is particularly fascinating because it doesn’t work like a regular success/failure roll at all. Instead, you describe how your character exposes themselves to harm in the battle and then roll your Light Die. That number is your Weak Point. You then roll a Dark Die for each of the treasure hunters in the fight. Ostensibly, you’re rolling against the Endurance of the Monster, but, if any of them roll your Weak Point, that increases your Ruin, which is like a harm track. One you hit 6 Ruin, you are Lost… So dramaaaatic, right?

Add to this the Devil’s Bargain, nicked from Blades in the Dark and you have a recipe for some real dark character moments in Trophy games. You crowdsource the possible options for both Devil’s Bargains and unfortunate consequences of failed rolls from everyone around the table and this makes for some extremely fucked up inevitabilities on a lot of rolls.

In conclusion

We have yet to finish Hester’s Mill. I know we have at least one more Set to get to. I’m really looking forward to going back to it. We’ll be dealing with the aftermath of something pretty messed up and, hopefully, finding some more goodies. I have to say, the Incursion has been very pleasing in introducing us to a lot of lore and cool fantasy history while also giving us the opportunity to get into fights and burn down shrines so far. With any luck, there’ll be more of that as we wrap it up next time.

How about you, dear reader? Have you played Trophy Gold? Or Hester’s Mill? What did you think?

The Feeling of Dungeon World

Hirelings to Heroes

My good friend Tom. recently kicked off a Dungeon World campaign. I’m a player in it. It’s got a very particular flavour and premise that places the players in the position of being the hirelings of the “real” adventuring party. And so it was at the start. But, before we had a chance to yell, “WATCH OUT FOR THAT FLESHY BOI MAN THING” the tables were turned and the PCs had to dig deep and find something heroic inside themselves or have the entire group die horrible deaths in the depths of the first dungeon. I would like to give a big shout-out to Tom’s awesome in media res beginning in a massive organic mouth with eyes on the inside and little flesh monsters. It rocked.

My character is Craobh Beag (pronounced something like Kreev Byug), a Kyrfolk (think minotaur whose bull half was a Highland) druid. Had a lot of fun with the shapeshifting and his generally chaotic nature. You can check out Tom’s post about how they built the world we’re playing in here.

A shaggy, red-haired straight horned cow in a field. — This is what my Dungeon World character looks like except with two legs and more vines. Highland cow by Nilfanion – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7868883

Old School?

But what I want to write about today is what the game evoked for me. As a player of a certain age, my first introduction to RPGs was the red D&D boxed set back in the late eighties. This was fairly normal at the time, as I understand it. It really was magic. I don’t remember too much of the mechanics of playing that game. My memory is reliably questionable. But I have a distinct memory of the feeling of it. The wonder of imagining my little dwarf swinging his wee hammer at monsters in some unnamed dungeon, having real adventures! I’d played choose your own adventure books like Fighting Fantasy and Zork before but this was entirely different. There was no way of save-scumming by keeping a finger on the decision entry page so you could go back if you didn’t like the outcome. The consequences felt consequential and the world was wide open. No limits!

When I think of old school games, I think these are the feelings they should elicit. Fear of threat, concern for real consequences, appreciation of truly impactful decisions, a sense of freedom in an open world and an enjoyment of the fantastic. I want to be fearful for the life of my character. I need to know that the decisions I make can have a truly terrible or wonderful impact on the world in some way. Now, there are a lot of differing opinions out there as to what constitutes an OSR principle. Some of them involve the inclusion of resource management, others disregard that as non-essential but insist that they should be ‘rules-lite.’ Anyway, let’s take this list I lifted from Wikipedia that comes originally from Matthew Finch’s A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming (2008.)

Rulings from the gamemaster are more important than rule books. Concoct a clever plan and let the gamemaster rule on it.

Player skill is more important than character abilities. Outwit the enemy, don’t simply out-fight them.

Emphasize the heroic, not the superheroic. Success lies in experience, not superpowers.

Game balance is not important. If the characters meet a more powerful opponent, either think of a clever plan or run away.

I think we can see that these four pillars of OSR games cover a lot of the feelings I want to get out of them. A sense of the fantastic is noticeably absent. But that might be something specific to me.

Dungeon World (2012) by Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel supports this type of play so well. It ticks all these OSR boxes! Now, obviously, I have only played the one session of it so far, but I have to tell you, the first of the stars I sent to Tom after that session was this:

right at the top I have to say that this is the closest I feel I’ve gotten to experiencing the feeling of playing old school dnd in a very long time. Despite the system being slightly different, it’s close enough that it feels familiar. More importantly, it’s the overall atmosphere [Tom] has created with a pretty traditional dungeon scenario with puzzles and traps in a recognizable fantasy setting. It really brought me back.

It’s an odd duck, Dungeon World. It is very much a PBTA game. You have bonds and moves and holds and degrees of success/success with consequences when you roll your 2d6. But you also have D&D’s core abilities, alignment, HP and magic spells. You even have classes like Dungeons & Dragons. The standard races are human, elf, dwarf and halfling (Tom has tweaked the list of available races or cultures in their campaign. Once again, you can read more about that in their own words here.) So, this is how it retains the flavour of D&D without the ruleset. LaTorra and Koebel could have made a dungeon exploration game that was far more Apocalypse Worldy. I mean, do you really need the D&D style stats? No. Is alignment necessary? No. But we are trained to understand that the fiction presented by those things is reminiscent of a particular type of game that we want to experience the feeling of again. Well, that goes for those of us who have had that feeling before. For others, who maybe never played anything but PBTA games and are loathe to dip their toes into OSE or DCC or even actual D&D, it offers them a chance to do that.

So we were on a storm-wreathed cliff-side, and we were being led by a ghost dog we had just befriended. The ghost dog walked through the air to the other side of the cliffs as though the rope-bridge was still standing. But the bridge had been cut in the middle. Still, we knew the undead doggie was trying to direct us to where we needed to be, so we used a combination of moves (shapeshifting into a forest bird), equipment (lots of rope, which our paladin ended up losing as a consequence of his actions) and luck (mixed success) to make it across to the other side (even though the self-same paladin decided it would be clever to tightrope walk across and nearly plummeted to a nasty death as a result.) This one scene involved most of the pillars of the OSR that I quoted above.

Old as new

Sometimes I find I just have to write about games like this, that are brand new to me, even though they have been out for over a decade. I’ve done it with OSE and Dragon Age too. This might seem a little redundant to some, but the way I look at it is that, if it’s new to me, it’s new to someone else too. I have to remind myself that somebody discovers OD&D every day. I only first tried a PBTA game about three years ago. When it comes to RPGs, there are trends and movements and there is always something new coming out. And there are quite a few people publishing articles on them. But I don’t think that any reason not to write about games like this that I am enjoying and enthusiastic about right now, no matter how old.

Dear reader, we have literally, only just begun our Dungeon World adventure and I am hoping to write more about it and the other games I’m currently involved in over the next few weeks. There are so many! I am looking forward, next, to discussing Trophy Gold, run by Isaac, and a new project/event that Tables and Tales is cooking up too. So stick around for more!

Death and Troika!

Whole-Hearted goodbye

The death of a PC in a role playing game might be something to mourn, it might be something to celebrate, it might be something assiduously avoided, it might even be something to seek out. But I think there’s one thing for certain: it’s almost always memorable.

When I think about the death of a PC there is a high-water mark for me. Heart is a game that builds up to that ultimate beat from the get-go. Your character’s death (or end at least) baked into the character creation system. The Zenith Abilities generally come in only two or three flavors and one of those is going to be the way your fucked-up little guy says goodbye. And yes, I know it‘s possible for a Heart character to die before their Zenith Ability goes off, but that’s only with the consent of the player. And, from my experience, the player really wants to make it to that finale. It is the greatest treasure they can obtain in the game. It is truly, all about them and how they do it. As the endgame hoves into view in Heart, the players are planning how they will work their big moment into the fiction and the GM is paddling away frantically like a murderous swan, to ensure it happens for them. And when the two meet in the middle? When player and GM both realize the ambition to achieve the perfect end? Chef’s kiss. One of the best feelings I have had playing any RPG, honestly.

And then there’s Troika!

Three adventurers protected by a magic shield against a hail of arrows. One of them takes an arrow to the back of the head though… — That’s gotta hurt. Art by Andrew Walken from Whalgravaak’s Warehouse.

We haven’t played much Troika. I ran three players through the hotel-based adventure, the Blancmange and Thistle, from the core Troika book last year. We did it as a one-shot and it was so surreal and hilarious that I knew I wanted to play more. So, in the summer, I thought I would give Whalgravaak’s Warehouse a go. Since then, we have lost one player (who moved to Spain, don’t worry) and two PCs. Please bear in mind, there have only been four sessions exploring the chaotic and bizarre workplace so far. We have lost one PC in each of the last two sessions! Tim got smashed and burned in an encounter with a blood sucking crimson giant (one of the warehouse staff) and Borrowick Grimpkin got got in an encounter with some wizardly loaders. So, this seems like a high lethality rate, right?

I think Troika has a fairly tough rule for character death. Essentially, if you go to zero Stamina (Health) and another PC comes to your aid in the same round, you have a chance of survival. This is particularly nerve-wracking for the incapacitated PC since Troika initiative is random. Each player and enemy gets a certain number of tokens and they all go into a bag at the start of each round along with one other token that, when drawn, means the end of the round. So you never know when it’s going to be your turn or when it’s going to be the end of the round! Add to this the fact that, if you go into negative stamina, you’re instantly killed, and I think you can see what I mean. On top of that, there is no way to increase your Stamina so you will always be exactly as squishy as you are at the start of the game, unless you add armor.

A warrior bleeds from the eyes and mouth as he is assaulted by some other dimensional horror. — I don’t know how to describe this one.

For poor Tim and Borrowick, they were beyond help, insta-dead, no coming back. Some of the enemies in Troika can do so much damage that they are not unlikely to one-shot the average adventurer. And that is the way the game is built. At least, that’s what I am coming to understand. You have to make the most of the time you have with your characters because it’s going to be a good time, not a long time.

Another thing I have come to understand is that, even in a game where your character’s end is not necessarily the goal, and not something you plan for, you can still have a good one that feels right and satisfying. After their character’s death, each of the players highlighted it as a major star of the session! The shock and the surprise element of their endings, in fights that seemed both unexpected and momentous, not to mention, in true Troika fashion, bizarre and unique, left them happy with how they went out.

I’d like to take this opportunity to share the obituaries I wrote up for each of them. I shared these in the general chat on our Tables and Tales Discord. After the second one in a row went up, we all agreed we needed a new channel entitled Fallen Heroes Obituaries. And that has been a big hit!

Tim

We lost a good one last night. Tim leaves behind his beloved gremlin-terrier, Brutus and fellow worthy adventurers, Ba’Naana and Borrowick Grimpkin. He had an illustrious career as a gremlin catcher before ever setting foot into Whalgravaak’s Warehouse. He had once managed to trip up one of Troika’s oversized citizens in the city’s renowned Gianttown district. This caused massive property damage but he still managed to capture the gremlin he was chasing at the time. In the warehouse Tim faithfully executed the wishes of his erstwhile patron, Exultant Wulf Memnemenoch by bludgeoning to death the alien cacogen known only as the Opportunist. Unfortunately, it was a member of staff of the warehouse that laid low the heroic gremlin catcher. He died bravely clubbing another giant, an enormous, crimson, vampiric one named Paude. And no doubt, his sacrifice was deeply appreciated by Ba’Naana and Borrowick Grimpkin as they accidentally but poignantly cremated his body just as the ancient warriors did for their honoured dead.

Borrowick Grimpkin

We lost another brave soul last night. Borrowick Grimpkin, Wizard-hunter extraordinaire, known across Troika City for his exploits in infiltrating and despatching an entire wizarding cult of Muhtrenex the Rufescent, Gulper of Blood, met his end. Despite having fulfilled his mission to slay the cacogen Opportunist, he and his team-mates continued in their exploration of Whalgravaak’s Warehouse. It was there that he was predeceased by his companion Tim in the battle with Paude the vampire giant. The circumstances of Borrowick Grimpkin’s passing were, in many ways, that of a workplace accident, impaled, as he was by the forklift arm of a rusty humanoid loader with the oxidised face of the wizard who created it. If it were not for the fact that, by his actions, his crate pilfering friends, Ba’Naana and Sticky Nicky were afforded the opportunity to escape, that might be how his death was recorded. Instead we can proudly state that Borrowick Grimpkin died as he lived, performing a dangerously acrobatic jumping sword attack from two stories up on a man made entirely of metal. RIP.

How does your group handle PC death, dear reader? Do they celebrate it? Do they rage against it? Are they forgiving or do they hold a grudge?

Dragon Age: Duty Unto Death

The Basics

You might recall, dear reader, that last year, I threatened to put together a game of the Dragon Age RPG. I even wrote a couple of blog posts about the game which you can find here. Well, I’m back to tell you that I’m not just all talk. Sometimes I really follow through on plans to play games. Myself and four other members of Tables and Tales started playing the short scenario, Duty unto Death for the Dragon Age RPG a couple of weeks ago. We’ve had two sessions so far.

The first was mostly session 0 stuff. Only three of the players were able to make it to that one, but those that did make it all created their own characters. My post on Dragon Age Character Creation stood me in pretty good stead for this. We ended up with an Antivan Wayfarer warrior, a Dalish Elf (which my computer keeps autocorrecting to Danish Elf) rogue and a human Apostate Mage (who is short and hairy enough to pass for a dwarf, thus fooling the silly templars.) Our final player joined us for this week’s session so, in order to allow us to get started as quickly as possible, he selected one of the four pregens that came with the scenario. He chose another warrior, this time a Surface Dwarf who makes a decent tank.

The group has a varied experience of both RPGs and Dragon Age. We have at least one super-fan of the video games. They know the lore inside-out and knew exactly what they wanted to play when they signed up for the game. The others all have some knowledge and several have played Dragon Age Origins recently. As it turns out, the scenario I chose is set right before the events of that game and features at least one major character from it, so that’s worked out really well.

We’re using our newly renovated independent game store, Replay as the venue. I haven’t been back there with a group since about this time last year, but since they have greatly expanded their gaming space recently, and because they are open late on Wednesday nights I wanted to give it a go. As always, the staff were welcoming and the place was great. The renovations are still under way but they have done all they can to accommodate players all the same. I can’t wait to see it when it’s done.

Tabletop

A screenshot from the intro to Tabletop with Wil Wheaton.

Does anyone remember the Wil Wheaton Youtube show, Tabletop? It was part of the Geek and Sundry network for quite a while but it looks like the last video is about seven years old now. Anyway, it mainly focused on introducing people to board games but this one time, they got Chris Pramas, the creator of the Dragon Age RPG to write a scenario they could play on the show. So Wheaton wrangled up a bunch of his show-biz pals and they made two half-hour videos of it. This was eleven years ago so it was a pretty early example of an actual play. And it was really good! It taught you the basics of how to play the game and entertained you at the same time. You can find the first episode here, Tabletop: Dragon Age RPG. If you are one of my players and you’re reading this right now, please don’t click on that link!

The illustration is of three heroes, an elf with a bow, a dwarf with an axe and a human mage battling a horde of undead. The words Dragon Age are at the top and the title of the scenario, Duty unto Death is at the bottom where it also indicates that it is an adventure for characters of level 2-4. — The cover of the Duty unto Death adventure for the Dragon Age RPG.

So, the scenario he wrote for it was Duty unto Death. They released it sometime after the show went live. He has included in the published version a few notes on how the game went on the Tabletop show, where the players surprised him, how he improvised certain encounters, that sort of thing. They are fun and possibly useful little asides. It’s short, teaches the basics of the game’s rules well and has lots of Dragon Age flavour in it so it was perfect for my purposes. There are quite a few other published adventures for Dragon Age, but most of them were much longer and would have required a lot more prep time on my part, which I don’t have right now. Duty unto Death is about 8 pages long. It’s not especially involved and doesn’t get into some of the tenets of the game. There is not much in the way of exploration or, indeed, social encounters. But, I feel like it’s doing what it sets out to do very well.

So far, our heroes, a group of Grey Warden recruits, traveling in Ferelden, have been left to their own devices by their leader, Duncan. Fans of DAO will know the name. It was fun to drop it in the intro. Anyway, he had introduced them to the duties of the wardens, gave them a few lessons about darkspawn and the blight and that buggered of to the Circle of Magi. He asked the recruits to head to a village to meet another Warden from Orlais. On the way, they got into a fight with a couple of darkspawn, tipping them off to the possibility of a coming Blight.

Cunning stunts

The Combat Stunts table from the Dragon Age RPG. It has 15 entries including "Skirkish - You can move yourself or the target of your attack 2 yards in any direction for each SP you spend," "Defensive Stance - You attack sets you up for defense. You gain a +2 bonus to Defense until the beginning of your next turn," and "lethal bloW: You inflict an extra 2d6 damage on your attack." The table shows the Stunt Point cost of each stunt on the left hand side and has the descriptions on the right. — The Combat Stunts table from the Dragon Age RPG.

That first battle was very instructive. It was the first time any of us had really interacted with the rules so we were all learning a little. After the first round, they had barely scratched these two Shrieks. It felt bad, like the worst sort of D&D, attritional combat, except for the highlight of the mage casting Walking Bomb on one of the bad guys. In the second round, people started rolling doubles and the stunts started coming. Sandor, the Surface Dwarf, added two extra dice to his damage with a Lethal Blow, almost smashing one of the darkspawn, and we were away. The players started to play more tactically, utilising their minor actions to add bonuses to their attacks by aiming, or bonuses to their defence by getting their guard up. They were utilising their class features almost immediately. I was surprised and genuinely impressive to see how instinctively my, admittedly very savvy and clever players, took to the mechanics. The combat ended with that Walking Bomb paying off, the Shriek went boom and took the other one with it, covering the entire party in black gore.

By the time they got to their destination, and found themselves in another fight, this time with some Devouring Corpses making a nuisance of themselves in the inn, it felt like they were old hands. We had to leave it in the middle of that battle since Replay was closing and we all had to go home. All in all, it has left me wanting more! Can’t wait for the next session.

Making Room for Roleplaying

Pay off

Twelve days into 2025 and I find two of my Gaming Resolutions are already paying off. Numbers 1 and 2 on my list went like this:

Make those stars sparkle and make those wishes come true: I was first exposed to Stars and Wishes this year when I took part in my first Open Hearth games. For the uninitiated, at the end of a session, a GM might ask their players for their Stars, i.e. stand out moments, moves, characters, players etc. and Wishes, in other words, what they would like to have seen happen in the session, what they wanted more of or less of or what they would like to see in future sessions. For a GM, this is an incredibly useful tool. It allows you to see what your players like and what they dislike. But, I find, too often, I don’t always re-integrate the stuff that came up in players’ Stars and Wishes. And I know, for certain, that when I do manage to apply what I learned from feedback, it has made my games better. So, how am I going to do this? I have an idea, that I literally just came up with, to create a spreadsheet to record each player’s Stars and each player’s Wishes from every session of every game. I’ll add in some columns to record potential ways to add more of the good stuff and ways to fix the problems that were revealed. Another column will summarise players’ reactions to the solutions. If it needs more tweaking, another column will detail that. I think this could be an invaluable tool to improve my games and will be there as a record so I don’t forget.

Brighter stars, wiser wishes: Sticking with the Stars and Wishes theme, I’d like to get more useful feedback from it. One of Tables and Tales’ fantastic founding members, Shannen, used a few methods to get more valuable feedback from her players in a game earlier this year. She requested feedback through DMs on our Discord. Why? Well, most people are pretty nice, actually. They tend to not want to offend anyone or say something in front of a group that might embarrass somebody. So, if you take the process away from the table, they might be more likely to tell you what they really think in private. We were just discussing this last night and, along with that, we all agreed that Stars and Wishes in the Discord chat for the game is way more valuable than having people just tell you them at the end of a session, when players are often pushed for time, or before they have had a chance to think about it and provide something really useful. So, my second resolution is to get written and private Stars and Wishes from now on.

Well, we had our fortnightly D&D game on Thursday night for the first time since our December break and everyone had great stars and wishes. They shared them on Zoom with everyone (it’s an online game.) But later some of them also shared theirs in our Discord chat as well. Tommy brought up a couple of really important points. One related to one of their favourite experiences of Wildspace in the game recently and how they would like to see more of that. This is the sort of thing that is easily actionable for me. With solid examples of the type of play people want to see more of, I can work to emulate that in the future. That was the easy one, and I am most grateful for it. More difficult might be their other wish: how do you get more meaningly relationships between PCs, as a GM?

Hands off

A halfling rogue, a femme elf druid and a masc human ranger in a forest presented at a slightly dutch angle. — An illustration of three adventurers from the D&D 5E 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide. They’re probably just about to have a long talk about their feelings. Little Bombo, there, is sick of Lilithidella’s owl always trying to fly off with him as a snack and Roger has been pissing off Lilithidella ’cause he keeps using all her shampoo.

Just butt out? Right? I could just stay out of it. I don’t need to always be sticking my oar in, do I? I think that’s fair. GMs have a lot of jobs to do already, so if the PCs start getting into a conversation that might very well help to build or break their relationship, the GM should just take their big nose and get it out of those PCs’ business. But, of course, listen, eavesdrop and take note. You never know what you might be able to use later.

Sounds simple, right? But to be able to do this, it means leaving room for it to happen. Even if you don’t necessarily encourage this sort of relationship-building exercise, you still need to make time where it could potentially happen. This is one of those unintended consequences of having a game based on a ship. You have built-in downtime while they travel. In fact, the first time they set off on their squid ship, I asked them if they wanted to take some time to get to know one another. Now, this was a band of adventurers who had been thrown together by the vagaries of chance and the unseen hand of powerful NPCs. None of them knew each other at all mere hours before lift off. And some of them had dark secrets. So, the suggestion was met with muted trivialities and outright lies, largely.

Instead, they got to know each other through their actions and words during their adventures, often in the most hilarious ways! Personal relationships were formed between certain of them in a pretty natural way. But there is a clear desire to make similar connections between other PCs. So, I am wondering how to leave space for that. There is an extended wild-space journey coming up, starting in the next session. This might be the best opportunity I have had to hand them that chance. My current plan is to simply ask how they are spending their time aboard ship during the voyage and hope they grab the reins themselves.

Hands on

Large white block letters spell out the name of the book, THE ELECTRIC STATE. They are overlaid on top of an illustration of a huge cartoon-cat-headed robotic drone, damaged and smoking hanging over an overpass beneath a slate grey sky. — a portion of the front cover of the Electric State RPG from Free League. The massive cartoon-cat-headed drone is so pooped after dealing with all the Tension in his party that he decided to take a break by hanging over this here overpass. Illustration by Simon Stålenhag.

But I can’t help thinking about the mechanic in a game I recently read, The Electric State. The Electric State is a road-trip game, so it has the journeying aspect in common with our little jaunt across fantasy space, if not much else. I think the designers looked at this genre and wondered how to bring recurring NPCs into it. I might be totally off the mark with this supposition but there is something about an adversarial or beloved NPC that comes up repeatedly in a campaign that players just love and the “on the move” nature of a road-trip game means that you might have to really shoe-horn in those characters to an extent that might feel very un-natural. So, instead of relying on your NPCs to cause stress and interpersonal drama, the game makes it so that the PCs have to be creating the Tension themselves. Tension is the name of the mechanic and it is required to allow your PCs to recover lost Hope (one of an Electric State character’s two tracks, along with Health that measures how they’re getting on.) Your PC has a Tension rating with each other PC, and vice versa. These ratings are likely to be unbalanced, i.e. Viv might have Tension 0 with Juan, but Juan has Tension 2 with Viv. This extract is from the core Electric State book:

To each of the other Travelers, you have a Tension score ranging from 0 to 2.
0 No tension, no question marks or unspoken thoughts or feelings.
1 Suppressed or contained irritation, love, interest, or other feelings and thoughts.
2 Uncontained strong emotions, such as rage, love, or even fear.

When you lose Hope points through play and you want them back, you have to contrive a scene with another PC with whom you have Tension. This might be an argument or a heart-to-heart talk or an emotional breakdown, but whatever form it takes, you both reduce Tension with the other PC by 1 point (if possible) and you regain a point of lost Hope. Of course, this means that, if your character does not have any Tension with any other PC, they have no way of regaining Hope points. So it is in your best interest to ensure you have some interpersonal drama at all times.

Dave Thaumavore, in his review of the Electric State, tended to think that this Hope-Tension feedback loop did little more than encourage manufactured drama between PCs. Of course, that’s the idea. The game is made to do that. It is certainly no coincidence that the mechanics work that way. But I can see his point. Will it feel too contrived? Will it be a pain for players to try and come up with new ways that one of the other characters has pissed off their own character all the time? Not sure. Haven’t played the game yet, but I’d willing to bet it would get bothersome if the campaign went on too long. Now, I will say that the Electric State is designed for short campaign play, so maybe it would be fine.

My question now is, if I wanted to try and tack on yet another non-D&D sub-system to this game, how would I do it with something like Tension? I could just take the Tension mechanic wholesale and give everyone a Tension score with everyone else. And then ask them to work out there shit in their downtime hours, so building more interesting and deeper relationships. But what motivation could I give them to do this? There ain’t no Hope points in D&D. But, maybe if two PCs deliberately get together to have a scene in which they reduced their tension, they could each take a boon, like a point of inspiration or temporary hit points or some other special effect only available to them when they work together next time.

Maybe the real question is, should I adopt this sort of mechanic just to encourage intra-party roleplaying? Or should I just keep out of the way?

Any thoughts or suggestions will be greatly received, dear reader!

After the Mind the World Again

Disco Elysium

Have you played Disco Elysium from the much lamented Za/um studio, dear reader? It’s one of those seminal, cult-classic games that shifted my thinking on what video games could be. It’s a mystery game but, is it, really? Even if it is, is the mystery the one presented? Is the goal to find out who killed that guy hanging from the tree in the yard behind the Whirling-in-Rags? I suppose it is, but only up to a point. When playing it, you quickly meet and pass that point, much to the frustration of your ever-suffering partner, Kim Kitsuragi. Psychologically freed of the mundane requirements of your character’s job as a police detective, you can finally get to work on the real mystery; finding yourself. In many ways, the game is a protracted character creation session. You have to do everything from defining his political and romantic persuasions, coming to understand his opinions on art, exploring his relationship with vices of all kinds to just figuring out his name. How does the game handle these revelations? Well, largely through the personification of various aspects of your Detective’s personality. These take the form of his stats, Intellect, Psyche, Fysique and Motorics and the various skills associated with them. They speak to you, often in deranged or idiosyncratic voices representative of their own, niche fragment of his personality, and try to get you to look at the world from their highly rarified perspective or to act based on it.

It’s a unique game. It’s also a unique experience that left me with so many interesting thoughts and questions. One such question was, could you make a TTRPG out of this? The answer is, you can certainly try.

After the Mind…

The Character Sheet screen from Disco Elysium. It shows each of the four main stats, Intellect, Psyche, Physique and Motorics and all of the skills that are associated with them in a grid on a black screen with white text. — The Character Sheet screen from Disco Elysium. The TTRPG stats are not as complicated as this.

Last night, I got together with four other members of Tables and Tales to play a session of After the Mind the World Again by Aster Fialla. The front cover of the game uses the tagline, ‘A murder mystery role-playing game.’ This is not an inaccurate description. However, I feel like the subheading on the next page is getting closer to the facts:

A Disco Elysium-inspired murder mystery TTRPG about a
detective and the voices in his head

In this TTRPG, the inspiration comes not from the fascinating world or the city of Revachol, it doesn’t come from the richly drawn characters of the video game, or even its ubiquitous politics. It comes, instead, from the essentials of the gameplay. In other words, the shit that’s going on in the Detective’s head and how it affects the world around him. You see, this is a GMful game that requires five people exactly, one of which is the lone player with the other four acting as GMs. Each GM represents one of the four stats from Disco Elysium, Intellect, Psyche, Fysique and Motorics. They are collectively referred to as the Facets. One of their responsibilities is to describe various features of the world the Detective moves through. Intellect has responsibility for nerdy people, art pieces, journals, etc. Meanwhile, Fysique gets stuff like buildings, a good strong state, and brawny folks.

At the start of the game, the player comes up with a name, pronouns and presentation for their Detective, as well as their role (they might not be a cop, but a PI or an insurance adjuster or something else.) Each of the Facets also gets a turn here, though. Psyche gets to describe the Detective’s face, while Motorics comes up with aspects of their style and an unusual object in their possession, for instance. I found this very fun, as did everyone else at the table, I think. I even commented that having others make your character for you in other RPGs could be just as fun!

Once that’s done, each of the Facets answers a couple of questions designed to form a baseline for their relationships with other Facets at the table. After the Mind the World Again is Powered by the Apocalypse, so this sort of character building question should be familiar to anyone who has played a game like that before.

Then they get started making the Neighbourhood. You go around the table, starting with the person who most recently played Disco Elysium, and get everyone to answer one of the five questions presented in the book that should give you an idea of the type of area this murder has taken place in.

Once you’re done with that, the Detective tells us a little about the victim and then each of the Facets introduces a piece of evidence from the crime scene. Intellect tells us about any Prior knowledge that’s relevant to the situation, Psyche describes a Person of Interest at the scene, Fysique comes up with a Landmark, in this case, where the murder occurred, and Motorics gets to reveal a clue, something tangible at the scene.

From that point, the Detective starts the investigation, describing what they are doing in the fiction, triggering particular Moves, using the Facets’ stats to make rolls and making Deductions in an effort to solve the murder. This is in line with the Detective’s Agenda:

Explore the world to its fullest.

Make the most of your Facets.

Play to find out the truth.

This is complicated by the fact that each of the Facets wants the Detective to act in different ways, offering sometimes conflicting options and sabotaging each-others’ efforts as they try to have the greater influence on the sleuth and the investigation. Facets’ stats can be boosted or reduced in various ways, often by the actions of the other Facets. Its important to note that the Facets’ Agenda is not focused on solving the murder, rather than constructing an interesting experience:

Create an intriguing world for The Detective to explore.

Highlight the differences between the Facets.

Play to find out what happens.

The Detective investigates, and the Facets Declare Evidence as particular features are described in the world. It’s up to the Detective to combine two pieces of evidence to Make a Deduction. When it comes to that point, they ask the Facets for explanations as to how they fit together. Whichever Facet’s explanation is chosen is the truth and the Facet gets a +1 to their stat, while also getting the opportunity to reduce the stat of another Facet by the same amount.

The investigation is structured into a Deduction Pyramid, which is split into four tiers. On the bottom tier, there should be eight pieces of evidence. These should be combined when the Detective Makes a Deduction so that, you end up with four Minor Deductions on the next tier up. These Minor Deductions should then be combined to come up with two Major Deductions on the penultimate tier. Finally, those Majors need to be combined to come up with the Solution to the murder, sitting right there at the top of the Pyramid.

There are several other mechanics in the game, including one to ensure that the Detective does not simply always choose the explanation of the same Facet all the time, which is clever. A Facet’s stat cannot go above +3 or below -1. If that does happen, the Facet gives the Detective a Condition and goes back to the default value of 1.

…the World Again

A screenshot of the aftermath of the Detective from Disco Elysium punching a twelve year old kid. The scene is in the yard of the Whirling in Rags hostel. A man in a green jacket and yellow flares stands over a prone kid who he just punched. Kim Kitsuragi, dressed in an orange jacket and brown baggy, tapered trousers looks on. — A screenshot of the aftermath of the Detective from Disco Elysium punching a twelve year old kid.

None of us had ever played a game quite like this one before. Obviously, some of us had played PBTA games in the past, so the mechanics were nothing frighteningly new. At points, I even felt echoes of a game of Avery Adler’s The Quiet Year that most of us played last year as we took turns describing the world around our Detective. That Detective was an amateur sleuth named Bruce with a fabulous moustache, a flight jacket, an obsession with whiskey and a curious ability to identify any wooden model aircraft he might come across.

But, sharing GMing duties with three others at the table is a unique and sort of chaotic experience. At the start, it’s actually a little difficult to get into gear. I was playing Motorics and I found I had to be constantly checking my playbook sheet to remind myself what features of the world were within my domain, what my GM Moves were and when I should use them. There are features in there that you might not expect so you have to watch it and you can’t use your GM Moves just whenever. Since all four of us Facets were feeling like this, it kind of stuttered into life as a session, once the character creation bit and the initial set-up of the mystery were done. Meanwhile, Bruce, played ably by relative TTRPG noob, Jude, had to come to terms with the fact that, when it came to any of the really important decisions, he had to give up control and ask the Facets for options before settling on one version of the truth or selecting a course of action.

As we got into the flow of it, though, and as some of us became more lubricated by the liberal application of fine Spanish lager, we found the conversation that was the game began to come much more instinctively. We were interacting with the mechanics and deliberately fucking each other over for stat points, while Bruce began to explore the small, dead silent village of Battersfield and investigate the murder of local baker, Barbara Devons. Evidence has been declared in abundance and two deductions have been made! Bruce managed to finally make it out of the Bakery to explore the office, the bare flour cellar and even the gay bar across the road. Unfortunately, we had to leave the case unsolved after the four hour session. Hopefully we’ll be able to pick the trail back up again soon.

We ended up having a really fun time with After the Mind the World again. The stand out scene for me was when Bruce was interrogating Jenny at the crime scene and all four GMs jumped in to answer in particular ways that they thought reflected their own domain within the one NPC. It worked surprisingly well, even though I’m not sure that’s how it’s supposed to work at all.

I would say that there is no way to play a full investigation in a single three hour session without rushing through scenes and maintaining the sort of laser-focus that Harry Dubois does not exemplify in any way. The character creation and making the mystery section took over an hour alone before Bruce ever rolled a die in anger. If you’re going to give it a go, plan it for two sessions.

Do you think you would like to give this game a try, dear reader? Or would you rather go back to Martinaise and collect some tare in a plastic bag while pondering that old wall again?

Gaming Resolutions 2025

New Years’ Resolutions

‘What do I want to change about myself?’
That’s the question I think most people are trying to answer when they come up with their New Years’ resolutions. The answers? Invariably, they are something like, I want to lose weight, I want to be healthier, I want to learn a new skill, I want to pick up a good habit, I want to read more, I want to watch less TV. Right?

For me, this kind of thing rarely works. The failure has little, if anything, to do with the challenge itself, usually. It’s about the arbitrary nature of it. You decide to make this change on New Years Day because its a new year, not due to any external or internal catalyst. To me, it robs the resolution of the weight of a meaningful promise to myself. And it’s not just me. By the the second or third week of January, the ruins of broken and abandoned resolutions litter the landscapes of our lives.

So, here’s another question, that you might be asking at this stage?
‘Why are you writing a blogpost entitled “Gaming Resolutions 2025” then, Ronan?’
It’s a very good question, dear reader, and you deserve an answer. To answer, I’m going to examine my gaming resolution of 2024. It was, in fact, my only resolution. At the close of the year I had been working on a Resistance System game for a few months. It didn’t have a name but the idea was that players would play magic users in the modern era. They would form a party and work together to achieve certain goals for their secret magical society while also attempting to outdo each other in power, reputation and knowledge. The central mechanic was centred around sacrifice and I was going to design Fallouts appropriate to that. I’d come up with some classes, skills, domains, resistances and the idea for unique mechanics by December 2023. So, my resolution was to finish working on that game and move on to the next one. That was, pretty much, the death-knell of my work on that game. I think the last work I did on that was in April, 2024. And that work was token, cursory at best. One thing I know for certain is that that promise to myself was too big. The game was too big, the amount of work it demanded of me was too much and the prospect of doing it was a little too stressful.

So, instead, this year, I am going to commit to getting a bit better at certain things, instead of committing a lot of time and effort to complete a project I didn’t even really know how to start. And these are all things that I have been thinking about for some time, stuff I have wanted to implement for a while to improve my play and the games I am involved in. So, it doesn’t feel so arbitrary.

So, without further ado, here are my…

Gaming Resolutions 2025

Make those stars sparkle and make those wishes come true: I was first exposed to Stars and Wishes this year when I took part in my first Open Hearth games. For the uninitiated, at the end of a session, a GM might ask their players for their Stars, i.e. stand out moments, moves, characters, players etc. and Wishes, in other words, what they would like to have seen happen in the session, what they wanted more of or less of or what they would like to see in future sessions. For a GM, this is an incredibly useful tool. It allows you to see what your players like and what they dislike. But, I find, too often, I don’t always re-integrate the stuff that came up in players’ Stars and Wishes. And I know, for certain, that when I do manage to apply what I learned from feedback, it has made my games better. So, how am I going to do this? I have an idea, that I literally just came up with, to create a spreadsheet to record each player’s Stars and each player’s Wishes from every session of every game. I’ll add in some columns to record potential ways to add more of the good stuff and ways to fix the problems that were revealed. Another column will summarise players’ reactions to the solutions. If it needs more tweaking, another column will detail that. I think this could be an invaluable tool to improve my games and will be there as a record so I don’t forget.
Brighter stars, wiser wishes: Sticking with the Stars and Wishes theme, I’d like to get more useful feedback from it. One of Tables and Tales’ fantastic founding members, Shannen, used a few methods to get more valuable feedback from her players in a game earlier this year. She requested feedback through DMs on our Discord. Why? Well, most people are pretty nice, actually. They tend to not want to offend anyone or say something in front of a group that might embarrass somebody. So, if you take the process away from the table, they might be more likely to tell you what they really think in private. We were just discussing this last night and, along with that, we all agreed that Stars and Wishes in the Discord chat for the game is way more valuable than having people just tell you them at the end of a session, when players are often pushed for time, or before they have had a chance to think about it and provide something really useful. So, my second resolution is to get written and private Stars and Wishes from now on.
Summaries in the chat: I don’t know why I don’t already do this for every game. It proved pretty useful in the Blade Runner game I ran earlier this year. In that one, I had a single document that I updated after each session so the players could easily keep track of what happened session by session. I always write up a summary after every session anyway, so taking the extra step to share it with the players is obvious really.
Take bigger swings: As a player, it can be tempting to take the safe route. After all, you don’t want your precious little guy to get hurt, right? WRONG! I have decided that it is far more interesting if your character makes the decision to put themselves on the line to save a friend in dire need, or to make the foolish decision to prioritise monetary gain over their own safety or to just do something cool instead of something sensible. I don’t necessarily think this style works in every game (I’m thinking of our current game of the One Ring, for instance) but where it does fit, I think it’s far more rewarding.
Get out of my comfort zone: I have a type; the gruff voiced, slightly grizzled veteran. That’s who I’m playing in two different ongoing campaigns right now and I am beginning to think I’m predictable. I don’t always play that, but it happens often enough that I can recognise it as a pattern. So, I have decided to make a conscious effort to play other types of characters. I am convinced it will lead to more fun and surprising experience for me and hopefully for my fellow players.

What about you, dear reader? Do you have any habits you want to break or strings you’d like to add to you role-playing bow? Let me know in the chat!

And finally, Happy New Year! Here’s to many more sessions and great experiences around the gaming table in 2025!