Tag: dungeons & dragons

Behind the Scenes for Winter 2022/2023

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This winter hasn’t really felt like winter. It’s just been so warm. Snow was here and gone within a week… It’s been warm and wet, which is not what an Ohio winter should be. I ended up spending a lot of time indoors because of the rain, and also it was frankly just depressing to go outside in January and be met with 50-60 degrees weather, so I wound up reading a lot. I also had a lot of substacks kick off in January so the “In Progress” section has gotten pretty big and so will be going under a cut.

A pile of comics and books leaned up against a pile of blankets. The back row has "Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel," "Strixhaven," "Candlekeep Mysteries," and "I Had Trouble getting to Solla Sollew." The front row has the first two issue of "Harley Quinn, The Animated Series: Legion of Bats!" and "The Adventure Zone: The Eleventh Hour."

Finished:

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens – A Christmas classic that I’d never actually read before. I was scared of the illustrations in the copy my mom had when I was a kid and then I converted to Judaism and couldn’t be bothered with Christmas—the primary Jewish irritator in December. But I do still adore “A Muppet Christmas Carol,” and there was an email substack like Dracula Daily called A Dickens December, so I thought, why not? I enjoyed it immensely, especially in seeing what made it into the Muppet adaptation. The answer is quite a bit.

I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew by Dr. Seuss – I lived and breathed Dr. Seuss books as a child, but had never read this one. I was gifted it for the holidays this past December because my mom had been recommended it for the philosophy of the book. What did that mean? I wondered, having not read the book. Well, this is the “Now my troubles are going/To have trouble with me!” book that I have seen quoted all over the place on Tumblr. It’s a Dr. Seuss meditation on handling the troubles life throws at you and it’s great. 10/10 would recommend.

Harley Quinn: The Animated Series: Legion of Bats! Issues #1 & 2 written by Tee Franklin – Harlivy limited series TWO! Following “The Eat, Bang, Kill Tour” and season three of “The Animated Series,” which I have still not seen. I am simply not a man who has time for playing TV show catch up, and, honestly, picking this up without watching is no different from picking up any comic series for the first time. Most comics reference things that happened in previous issues/series or other associated titles, and “Legion of Bats” and “The Eat, Bang, Kill Tour” are even more explanatory than most, since the TV show audience and comics audience aren’t necessarily a 100% overlap. I’m a prime example of that. Anyway, Harley is fighting crime with the bat-fam and Ivy is set up to take over the Legion of Doom, what could go wrong!

Letters from Watson: The Gloria Scott, The Musgrave Ritual, The Spotted Band, The Resident Patient, The Noble Bachelor, The Second Stain & The Reigate Squires by Arthur Conan Doyle – Much like A Christmas Carol, I’ve seen a variety of Sherlock Holmes adaptations, but I’d never actually read the original stories. I’m enjoying them a great deal, especially seeing how they’ve been presented in a roughly chronological fashion rather than publication order and we can see Holmes’ and Watson’s relationship develop. My favorite currently is “The Spotted Band,” which, while not the first to involve a murder, was the first presented about solving a murder.

Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos – So, I know I’ve said before that D&D books often don’t need to be read from beginning to end, but when you’re developing your own campaign from scratch sometimes it’s a good thing to do. Strixhaven is also a really cool setting, though the pre-written campaign bits that come with the book don’t do a ton for me, they’re fun, just not my cup of tea when adventure planning. What I do adore, however, is the emphasis on accessibility and queer inclusion. There is official book art featuring disabled students and same sex couples, a whole sidebar about accessibility magic at the school, and flavor text for an NPC about her work running a support network for transgender students.

Candlekeep Mysteries – Another D&D book, a collection of campaign modules based on the sprawling library of Candlekeep and very easy to adapt for a variety of settings. There are some really interesting stories in this collection, each based around a book held at Candlekeep. My personal favorite is “Mazfroth’s Mighty Digressions,” which presents not only a mystery about why a book has suddenly turned into a monster but a moral question about monsters and what makes a monster. There’s also another module that has an explicitly nonbinary NPC.

Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel – This is another collection that offers modules with some really fabulous and nuanced moral conundrums. It also provides 15 new settings/civilizations based on various cultures of color and written by people from those backgrounds. I’ve talked about this book before here, but at the time I had only read the set up and introduction to the book and the citadel itself and a few of the new setting gazetteers. I cannot recommend enough reading through the whole module and not just the gazetteer, even if you don’t think you want to run it because a lot of world building is captured within the modules themselves.

The Adventure Zone: The Eleventh Hour by the McElroys, illustrated by Carey Pietsch – So this was by far the most changed of the TAZ: Balance arcs adapted as a graphic novel so far. Entire subplots are cut, traps are altered, motivations are changed, Sazed becomes Phillipe. I really don’t get why that last changed happened, but the rest of them I do understand. The Eleventh Hour was a long arc, with a lot of exploring and fucking up and exploring again. There were also a lot of classic ttrpg traps and puzzles in this one that might make a good game and podcast, but don’t make such a good graphic novel. That said, I am sad we lost Chekov’s bush. All the changes are really good though and make for a great, cohesive graphic novel.

Continue reading “Behind the Scenes for Winter 2022/2023” →

10+ Alternatives to Dungeons & Dragons

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There’s been a lot of hubbub recently surrounding Wizards of the Coast’s updated Open Gaming License, and while it appears that the worst of OGL 1.1 has been rolled back in iteration 1.2, trust has been broken and many fans remain wary at best and riotously upset at worst. With anxieties swirling it really does seem like a good time to be exploring other systems, which is always fun, but feels extra relevant at the moment.

Let’s start with Powered by the Apocalypse, which is a framework for games that have been built using core elements of the game Apocalypse World, among others. There are many, many PbtA games out there that will speak to a variety of interests. Like D&D, you play to specific classes, here called playbooks, and your selected playbook page also doubles as your character sheet. Unlike D&D, you’re rolling with two d6s instead of the full complement of d4 to d20. The three games I’m most familiar with are:

  1. The Veil, a cyberpunk world where life has become filtered through a digital “veil,” think constant VR overlay/Google glasses. I’ve been having a lot of fun playing it with a group of friends. I talk a bit about my character building process in my post on Jewish roleplaying games. 
  2. Monster of the Week is about well, hunting monsters. It’s based on the style of the episodic monster hunt common in shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the early seasons of Supernatural. A really fantastic actual play run of Monster of the Week is season two of The Adventure Zone. 
  3. Urban Shadows is an urban fantasy game steeped in supernatural politics. It’s got vampires, werewolves, angels, ghosts and more living as rival/coexisting factions. This was the system used for The Adventure Zone mini campaign Dust. 

 A common thread of PbtA games is that they are incredibly versatile when it comes to personalizing both the world and your individual characters. For example, in Monster of the Week it is on the players to set up the final encounter with the monsters, and in The Veil there’s a move you can use to create an NPC that your character knows—of the course the quality of your role dictates how well that relationship is going. 

Next up is Blades in the Dark. This game is Victorian-esque gothic with lots of crime and seedy underbellies. Or at least, that’s the world that Blades sets up for you—The Adventure Zone’s ongoing campaign, Steeplechase, puts the Blades system to use in a much more futuristic criminal environment. While I’ve never played Blades, I’ve really been enjoying the play style presented in Steeplechase and it prompted me to pick up a copy of the game for myself. I’m particularly interested the stress/trauma mechanic, wherein if you fill up your stress meter you’re levied with a trauma that sticks with your character. It’s very cool.

A game I have played, many times in fact, is The Quiet Year. It’s a communal map-making game, where you create and act as community over the course of a year, answering prompts on a deck of cards. I know that both Friends at the Table and The Adventure Zone: Ethersea have used The Quiet Year to develop cities/towns that larger campaigns take place in. While you aren’t supposed to have individual characters, some friends and I (a different group than the Veil group) have taken to playing The Quiet Year with preset casts, which allows for a different and new set of dynamics to emerge than might come out in a typical game. The first one we did we used a selection of crew and officers from the Franklin Expedition and our current game is based on the Donner Party. 

Another staple of the role playing game world is the one-page rpg. They are everywhere and about everything, and they range from serious to silly, though the ones on my radar veer silly, like Honey Heist, where you play as bears trying to steal honey, or Dadlands, a post-apocalyptic world where everyone is a dad. Some other great one-page rpgs in my collection are:

  1. Lasers & Feelings, space exploration at its finest. You can check out The Adventure Zone: Hootenanny for an actual play experience. 
  2. On the Path, a Witcher-inspired hack of Honey Heist. Your stats are “Hmm” and “Fuck.”
  3. Escape from Triassic Park, You are a genetically re-engineered dinosaur. What will you do?
  4. Potato, you are a halfling trying to tend to your potatoes, but things just keep happening. 

Some other short games, but not quite one page short, are things like Northwest Passage, a Tunnel Goons hack; The Warmest Place to Hide, a The Thing-inspired game based on Caltrops Core, a d4-based system; and Lilliputian: Adventure on the Open Seas, which has a single page with all the rules amidst a more expansive zine about running an ocean adventure. 

Lastly, it’s…. Monty Python’s Cocurricular Mediaeval Reenactment Programme. You can strewth (nat max)! You can spam (nat 1)! You can meet your favorite Flying Circus personalities! You get to roll with exciting, nontraditional dice, such as the d14, d16, d18 and d30!

While the rulebook isn’t out yet, there is a quick start demo available for free from the publisher, which I used to run a game for my family over the holidays — it was very fun and encourages you to make things up and get silly with it. Additionally, one of the co-creators ran a live play session during the Kickstarter, which is available to watch on YouTube. It also should be noted that you don’t need to have an encyclopedic knowledge of Monty Python for the game to be fun. Sure, when I ran the game it had been on the back of binging Flying Circus in its entirety three times in a row, but my players certainly hadn’t. It is, first and foremost, a role playing game, it’s just got added flavor.*

*I have been strongly reminded (I have not) that Monty Python’s Cocurricular Mediaeval Reenactment Programme is in fact a reenactment programme where you will learn about British history and should in no way be considered a role playing game.

UPDATE 1/27/2023: As it turns out Wizard’s of the Coast has completely rolled back their plans for an updated Open Gaming License.

Jewish Role Playing Games, Take 2

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Hanukkah sameach!

In 2020, I made a post about role playing games that can be played with dreidels. It came to mind again this year because it started getting a lot of attention as Hanukkah approached, and I realized that I ought to do a follow up. Since that original post, I completed my conversion to Judaism and have become a lot more well versed in table-top role playing games.

Now, there is a history of fantasy games and media not treating Jews the best, when we’re there at all. See Dungeons & Dragons with its undead liches and their phylacteries, how golems are framed as monsters, or this article about Jewish tabletop miniatures from the 1980s, and how some were based on antisemitic stereotypes. I found that article while hunting for Jewish-looking miniatures for a rabbinical student character I play in a Powered by the Apocalypse game. While I didn’t find any that suited my needs, I did find a Maccabean army set designed for war games as well as some cool, non-evil looking golem miniatures on Etsy—a PC (player character) figure of a golem artificer, this guy who gives me delightfully Jewish vibes, and this rock/nature “golem” who’s got an elf friend.

More importantly, and the point of this post, is that I also found a whole slew of wonderful, independent, Jewish-made role playing games. Below the cut I will give you a break down of those games as well as talk about a few more mainstream games and how I incorporate Jewish elements into PCs I make and the games I run.

Continue reading “Jewish Role Playing Games, Take 2” →