The RPG Study

The Beta documents for Free League Publishing's new fantasy role-playing game Dragonbane, were released several weeks ago and have received steady updates throughout the beta process. Kickstarter backers have been able to play and test the system. Here at the RPG study, we have had the opportunity to playtest these rules, just a little bit, and have some thoughts on some of the content that we've seen so far. A lot of skill(s) Reading through the rules document we got the impression that Dragonbane presents a swingy, but fast resolution mechanic. Nearly every situation encountered in the game is resolved through the skill system. Want to make an attack with your sword? Want to look for traps? That's a skill. Want to see if you remember an interesting bit of lore? That's a skill. What makes the game quick is this resolution mechanic. Dragonbane flips the traditional convention of rolling a D20 on its head, at least compared to a system like 5E. In Dragonbane, 20’s ...

S7: Warehouse - Storage Area      A large warehouse sits near the wharf. Rails lead up to it's large main door located in the middle of its longer side, allowing freight and other sizable deliveries to be easily stored inside. The tracks continue inside and a turntable allows the carts to turn 90 degrees in either direction so that goods can easily be loaded or unloaded from anywhere in the warehouse. The rest of the warehouse is a warren of stacked crates, boxes, barrels, and sacks of a variety of goods and sundries. A small door exits on the North side to a small office space and stairs lead down into the basement. And the entire neighborhood so far:

S7: Herbalist's Ship A cramped working space, this tiny shop is tucked in a small alley off the main thoroughfare. The proprietor, an absolutely ancient halfling druid named Gilroy creates poultices and salves from his vast collection of dried herbs, flowers, roots and other preserved plant parts. The shop has almost no space to move for any creature larger than a halfling. This has become such a problem that Gilroy has begun doing business with larger creatures through the shop's front door. The current state of the neighborhood:

S5: Private Residence - 2nd Floor Burla’s bedroom is a cozy place where she seeks refuge from harsh city life. A large bed dominates the room, but it also includes a wardrobe and small sitting table. Plants are strewn about the room, Burla’s attempt at bringing some more natural scenery to her stone and brick surroundings. Stairs leads down to the main floor. The entire Street Level up to this time can be seen below. I have really been enjoying this process and have been learning a lot about image processing and map making, two aspects of game design that seemed completely inaccessible to me, but after doing the work to read and watch a bunch of tutorials I have definitely started to put together my own workflow. The real hard part now is finding myself style. I've been inspired heavily by Dyson Logos and Mike Schley, two of the best in the business, but the community on Instagram participating in the #Dungeon23 challenge have been churning aweso...

  A New Year could very well mean time for a new Campaign! One of the newest adventures to come out for 5E D&D is the excellent Shadow of the Dragon Queen by Wizards of the Coast. Set in the magical realm of Krynn, this adventure is the first official product dealing with this storied setting. Whether you are starting a new game, or continuing one, the latest release from The RPG Study, Trinkets of Krynn provides you and your party with one hundred unique objects and trinkets that can be used in your campaign right away. These objects have been drawn from the text of the original first edition Dragonlance releases, from DL1 Dragons of Despair all the way through DL14 Dragons of Triumph , but no prior experience with any of these modules is required.  A few example trinkets include a small unicorn carved from valenwood trees, a perfectly round snowball that doesn't melt, and a quill from the library of Palanthus.  Check out  Trinkets of Krynn  on the DM's ...

S4: Private Residence This house is the home of the cobbler, Burna Selistan. She moved in approximately 3 months ago. She uses the main floor for cooking and eating, but also does some of her work here too, when she doesn't feel like traveling to her shop. The main room consists of a hearth, a large wooden table with round stools and a few comfortable upholstered chairs sit in the corners near the windows.  One set of stairs leads to the bedroom on the second floor and another leads down to the basement. A front door leads out to the main thoroughfare and a second door leads out back to the alley behind her house. The entire dungeon so far:

S3: Trevylin's Steelworks The neighborhood blacksmith, Trevylin’s Steelworks, is the best place to purchase and repair arms and armor. Trevylin’s quality of work is average at best, but his prices are possibly the lowest anywhere in the city. The shop itself is approximately 20 ft by 50 ft with a small 20 ft square add-on. The forge and anvil are the center pieces, the walls lined with finished goods. A small cabinet in the add-on contains a rolled by straw mattress. Trevylin sleeps in the shop at night, afraid someone will come steal his goods. The entire "dungeon" so far:

Dungeon23 - The 365 days of Crypt-mas... Like many others online, I have decided to participate in Dungeon23 originally dreamed up by Sean McCoy of Tuesday Knight Games , the company responsible for the award winning table top RPG, Mothership . The idea is simple enough, create one room of a dungeon each day, and at the end of the year you will have a 365 room mega-dungeon. To add some complexity, the rooms of the dungeon will be distributed into 12 levels or layers.   There has been a lot of buzz on Internet about this idea, even going so far as sparking the hashtag #Dungeon23 (a tag you will be seeing around here a lot!). Many of the interested dungeon designers are planning to use some kind of journal or gridded notebook to track the shapes of their rooms and the dungeon layout, as well as record the specific details of the room being generated. Other parts of the online discussion include alternate ideas for dungeon composition including letting some of the layers be wilde...

Rather than giving a play-by-play style recap or our second session, I would like to just give my impressions of the content from Ghosts of Saltmarsh (GoSM) that was used for this particular session, namely the Ruins of Warthalkeel. In Appendix A of GoSM, there is a series of three adventure locations set under the sea. Each location has a standard layout and inhabitants, but also contains four Adventures that be grafted on top of this location which interact with the default elements of the adventure locale. Each of these adventures is for a different party level and I must say, I love this approach, though it's not perfect. Of the three, only one of the adventure locations has a first level adventure and it also happens to be my favorite of the three locales: Warthalkeel. The setup I used was a bit modified from the hook provided in the book . The actual ruins themselves were great. My players had a good time exploring the wreckage of this doomed town. I set an actual timer of on...

In a delightful twist of fate, I have been asked by a group of players I didn't even know were an organized group to be their DM. I happily accepted, especially as the time constraints of the group fit quite nicely into my personal schedule. And of course, another game means another opportunity to try and play some of the voluminous D&D content I have acquired since I began DMing. I have wanted to play Ghosts of Saltmarsh for years now. I loved the concept of a campaign assembled from disparate adventures, it's typically how I build mine rather than following one long adventure path style campaign, but could never find a good way to integrate it into an ongoing game. The players in this new campaign are generally new to D&D, or returning to it after some time away. As such, the desire for a classic fantasy RPG was high. I decided an adventure in the grim world of Greyhawk would be just the thing. We have been using Discord to coordinate and organize our campaign and in ...

Time for another Product Release announcement: Elmandar's Star Charts . Design and customize your own Wildspace systems with the light and flexible system presented in Elmandar’s Star Charts on the Dungeon Master's Guild. Providing 26 pages of random tables and guidelines to detail Wildspace systems for use in your 5E Spelljammer: Adventures in Space campaign, this system was inspired by the random system rules from the 2e Spelljammer box set, and adds some modern updates to be more flexible and usable by the 5E rule set. Included in Elmandar’s Star Charts are blank Wildspace system tracking sheets and Wildspace System Maps to help visualize the layout of your systems. The sheets and maps come in full color and printer friendly black and white options. Blank tracking sheets and maps are also fillable forms. Elmandar’s Star Charts contains three complete Wildspace Systems for immediate use in your own Spelljammer and as inspiration for systems you design. These systems come with...

The Light of Xaryxis is a sprawling, exciting, adventure in the Spelljammer setting. An adventure for levels 5-8, the adventure is told in a series of short episodes requiring about 2-3 hours to play each. Each episode ends on a dramatic cliffhanger for the next episode to follow. What follows is an account of my groups experience with the first two episodes, and my thoughts on certain parts of the adventure: Chapter 1: Astral Rain The party is supposed to begin this adventure in a coastal city. I choose Neverwinter since our party consists of three characters from the world of Ravnica who have traveled the branches of Yggdrasil to arrive in the Forgotten Realms (a long story which perhaps I will recount another time). The other three characters are brand new to the campaign, though their players are not. Notably, one of the character is a giff from the Astral Adventurers Guide.  Neverwinter works just fine for this start. Right away we encountered one of the major criticisms leve...

Shameless plug time: My latest supplement for the DM's Guild is now live! Spelljamming Vessel Log  provides a vital resource for managing a spelljammer! This log  enables a party of space farers to easily and quickly reference all of the important details for their spelljamming vessel including ship stats like HP, AC, Speed, etc. as well as the specific details of the weapons mounted on their ship. There is a roster for crew members and cargo alike, as well, so all pertinent details of the ship are in easy reach. The supplement contains a full color single page (front and back) tracking sheet as well as a printer friendly black and white option. It also includes two example logs for the  Moondancer  and the  Second Wind  from the  Light of Xaryxis  adventure.

  Wow. That Wizards direct had some big drops. Now, I consider myself both a fan of Magic (I started playing with 4th Edition) and D&D, but the real meat of today's announcements for me was all on the D&D side. One D&D! Backwards compatibility! Virtual Table Top! Planescape! There was a lot to unpack and I will be taking the next several posts to parse what we observed. If you haven't seen it yet, check out the video: The biggest news is definitely the release of the One D&D playtest documents (available on D&D Beyond as we speak ), but if I'm being honest there was something else that got me super hyped. And it's not Planescape. It's the complete Phandelver campaign! I loved Lost Mine of Phandelver . It was one of the best adventures I've ever run, it was an incredible on boarding experience for 5E D&D for my 4E group. I have reread that adventure at least a dozen times. It is comfort food reading for me. It does such a good job of pres...

 Spelljammer: Adventures in Space just released and with it comes a whole host of new mechanics for the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Most notable of these is probably the titular spelljamming  which allows a spellcaster to control a space-faring vessel and control its movement. Ship-to-ship combat gets a good section explaining the mechanics of such combat and as far as I can tell it is similar to the ship rules in Ghosts of Saltmarsh, but as I was reading these rules, something jumped out at me that I thought could use some attention. When onboard a spelljamming craft, one player must necessarily be the  spelljammer for the vessel, guiding it through Wildspace and the Astral Sea. Other characters can man the variety of weapons that may be fixed to their ship, a vital task since operation of a single weapon requires multiple actions. The last required role onboard the ship is that of Captain. Now, you might think that someone designated as captain would have a...