Three Months, Three New RPGS: Jan-March

 Sometime in the last week of January, myself and two of my online friends (who all happen to share the same name) spoke about doing a "challenge" where we each run 12 new tabletop roleplaying gamess, one per month, totaling in 36 different RPGs by the end of the year. Well, we almost immediately weren't able to fulfill our goals in February, but I've been fortunate to have the opportunity to run three different tabletop games so far in the last three months: DnD 5E in January, Old School Essentials in February, and then Dialect in March. Of course, I've played and ran DnD 5E for a long time, so it doesn't count towards the challenge-- but I'm bending the rules a bit to include the one other brand-new game I did manage to play this February and letting that take over my January slot. I figured I'd give my impressions of each of the games here, because I'm long overdue on blog posting and I need to stop playing War Thunder. 

So, Game #1: The Quiet Year (By Avery Adler of Buried Without Ceremony).

The Quiet Year is a collective (gm-less) storytelling game by a dev which I had never heard of until I looked up The Quiet Year's webpage just now.  The Quiet year's basic pitch is a mapmaking game where you explore the lives of a community who has survived the apocalypse, over the course of one year, until the arrival of the "Frost Shepherds" at the end of the year, which is the end of the game.

 Buried Without Ceremony

A deck of 52 cards is used to stimulate each week of the year, with each card triggering certain events, and each event being a reflection of the seasons. I played this game with three others in-person over the course of about three hours-- I was not the owner of the game (they had printed a pdf, put it in a nice booklet, and facilitated our experience). It was an interesting experience-- mechanically simple and sound, and a fun way to build a map-- perhaps for another game? My group kept the tone pretty light with echoes of darkness, but I think a more well-acquainted group well-versed in these sorts of games could explore some really emotional subjects with this game-- which is what I like about it. I'd definitely play again, and it may be worth buying the pdf for myself.

Game #2: Old-School Essentials (By Gavin Norman of Necrotic Gnome). 

Old-School Essentials is definitely my favorite new game I've played in a while-- although in some ways, it's not really a new game. If you're in the TTRPG community and either have not expanded out from D&D 5E, don't play fantasy TTRPGs, or live under a rock, you may not have heard of Old-School Essentials-- but I'm grievously late to the party on this game. OSE's basic game is a restatement (magnificentophat has jammed into my brain that it's not a retro clone) of the Basic/Expert rules of DnD, specifically the 1981 Moldvay rules. Along the way, they've clarified some rules and formatted things splendidly within the print copies (and probably the digital copies) so that no paper is wasted, every character class is on a two-page spread, and a multitude of other improvements enough to make any layout lover like myself drool. 

Peter Mullen for Necrotic Gnome / Old School Essentials FB Group

My library of Old School Essential products currently includes their two boxed sets, the Classic Game Set and Advanced Expansion Set. I'll probably end up talking about the Advanced rules some other time, but suffice to say they're an adaptation of the 1st Edition Advanced DnD classes, spells, races, monsters, and treasure for B/X. For the three sessions of OSE I played, I stuck with the rules contained in the Classic Game Set and ran Necrotic Gnome's adventure module The Incandescent Grottoes.

I liked a lot of things about OSE. I've never run an old-school game before, either in terms of style or mechanics, so it was super exciting to get to try something a little different and also run my first straight-up dungeon crawl which wasn't a poorly written kobold cave or burial mound I shoehorned into a 5E DnD game with less than desirable results. I photocopied the map to make it available to my four players during the session, I had a battlemat during the first session (forgot it promptly for the second and elected not to bring it for the third), and it was really fun running the ecosystem of a dungeon. I was supposed to write an elongated play report for each of these sessions for this blog, but I didn't, so you'll have to suffice for the summary one of my players drafted up for sessions 1 and 2 of the crawl:

I'm going to run Old School Essentials again, and maybe one day I'll even play it. Expect more of this game featured soon, especially when I get the four zines and one GM screen I just ordered in print. 

Game #3: Dialect (By Kathryn Hymes and Hakan Seyalioglu of Thorny Games).

Dialect is another great wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey storytelling game in a vaguelys imilar vein to The Quiet Year, in that it's gm-less (though I facilitated), takes you through the rise and fall of an isolated community, and has great potential for intimate and emotional storytelling. Dialect in specific focuses on that isolated community's language, how their lingo and vernacular shapes and changes the community and their perception of the world around them, and how it dies with the community. It is a super cool game facilitated by a series of index cards signifying the different eras of the community, and a great set of backdrops and game cards to guide the experience. I'll leave the play report to the same epic friend who wrote those little snippets for our OSE game. 

Our little language tableau for Dialect. 

"tonight [dhole] and [other person] , and I sat down to play [Dialect], a game for emulating the evolution & death of the common tongue of an isolated community:

we inhabited the messy history of a group of Netizens who are normal EXCEPT!!! any computer they operate can run the chat client, **synecdoche**.

the game let us establish other commonalities; the community believes all outsiders live in permanent miscommunication; **synecdoche** itself has been operating since the earliest days of computer communication; the death rate of its users is 300% normal; the community recently tried a takeover of the real-world city of Austin, TX before being gunned into hiding again.

table set, onto the meat of the game:  in each round us players all drew a prompt each, to create a word unique to users of **synecdoche**. these typically ended up being a meme or in-joke particular to the community, i.e.:

* 'dad' meaning dead, see also 'daddy' or 👨‍🍼

* #gravegoods 🎂  when a member dies under non-mystery circumstances, often celebrated /accompanied by footage of their normal death

* 'boot'ing someone is sending them a piece of custom text that permanently kicks them from the system, a new and unprecedented social tool with a destabilizing effect

we proceeded to play out the arguments, anxieties, and ultimate bad endings of three  characters, one to each of us apiece:

* my character succor-witch (#ihardlyknowor7743), a fifty something old guard Austin homeowner who wants to get the community offline & offers safe haven for lost synecdochers

 * [dhole's] @.twice_broken_clock, a no-nonsense coder from the Balkans trying hold the line against the cruel mainstream culture

* [other person's] WeRthe99, an agitator or agitators pushing to expand the reach of **synecdoche**

ultimately, succor-witch died on the way to try to break her normie wife out of prison, who was scooped up in a raid, after twice_broken's global message of understanding and tolerance was ignored by mass culture's stopped-up ears during a wave of international scrutiny towards the mysterious internet subculture. WeRthe99's legion is left to pick up the pieces as **synecdoche** itself is regurgitated as a glorified magical slack channel under the new ownership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. broken blows up her hacker compound and wanders out into the wilderness that is the real world."

Jill De Haan for Thorny Games

Doesn't this game sound awesome? I sure felt so. Really good stuff. Would definitely play again.

That's all for these months, folks. Not sure what's coming up in the next few months, but hopefully I don't break my wallet trying to do this challenge. 

Advanced Wild Shape for Old School Essentials

 Wild Shape is a mechanic which by my first available reference was first introduced to Dungeons & Dragons in Advanced D&D 2nd Edition, released in 1989. Then, it was referred to as Shapechange, only gained at 7th level, and allowing a Druid to transform into a mammal, bird, and reptile once per day each. This mechanic was pretty much directly imported into Old School Essentials' Advanced Fantasy Expansion rules, created by Gavin Norman. I like the way this ability is implemented in both systems, it sort of embodies the old school design process of limited character power, but also a greater power scale from first level to the highest levels (that being 15th, at least for some classes, in OSE). In modern 5th and 5ther editions D&D, Wild Shape is a core mechanic which manifests at 2nd level! That's a far cry in power scaling from the B/X days-- Wild Shaping is now a core druid mechanic and for some players, that may the only reason they choose Druid (there's something to be said there about how modern Druid spellcasting options are not super desirable when compared to the blaster caster wizards and sorcerers played so often these days). 

But now I've set out to create a variant Wild Shape mechanic for OSE. Why? Because one of those Druid players who plays a Druid because they like Wild Shape is at my table. They're playing a wild shape character right now, in my current 5E game! But... I am hoping to convert this current 5E game into a future Old School Essentials game, for reasons I will probably spend some time talking about in another lengthy post, to be written on another day. What I don't want to do is steal my Druid player's awesome wild shape away from the, because that's seemingly what they're most interested in doing in-game. So, here are some prototype mechanics for wild shaping more commonly in OSE.

Ability Removals:

A character using the advanced wild shape mechanics removes two druid mechanics from their repertoire: their Fire & Electrical Resistance trait, and their Shapechange trait.  

The New Mechanic:

Wild Shape. A Druid can expend one of their prepared spells to transform into a standard beast (such as a mammal, bird, or reptile) once per day. They can only transform into a creature of a number of hit dice equal to twice the level of the spell expended. They assume all the statistics of that creature. When they drop to zero hit points in that creature's form, they return to their standard form with half the hit points they had when they transformed. 

Wow, that was simple, wasn't it? Makes wild shape have more of a cost while retaining its power and scaling, I think. Let me know what you think. We'll see how this works out in my game. I may still just have the character use the standard OSE druid, and come up with a creative story reason for their wild shape to be removed until they reach level 7, but that's something I'll mull over in another post.

Ta ta for now. 

His Majesty the Worm: Tomb of the Golden Ghosts, Session 1

 Friday, January 17th, a few others and I did a "playtest" (more of a let's-see-if-we-like-this-test) of His Majesty the Worm, an OSR-adjacent dungeon crawler that styles itself as highly procedural, phase-based game, with tarot cards acting in the stead of dice. I was one of the players, and conscience1121 was our gracious game master, who had introduced the idea of testing out the system. We used a set of well-made pre-generated characters, of four different paths (classes).

An intrepid guild of four souls ventured down through the Ossuary underneath the Great City of the Tyrant into a recently rediscovered tomb-- they had a well-drawn map, a well-supplied pack, and their wits about them. 

    

They were the Trabajadors. In marching order, they were:

        Champion Tohma Ironpax, a hired human bruiser of the Path of Pentacles.

        Bizmuth Mourn, a young human crusader of the Path of Swords.

        Shalsor Sable-leaf, an elven arcanist of the Path of Wands.

        Tovald, Sixth Son of Five, a dwarven retired solider of the Path of Cups.

A bond chart of the four characters, mocked up by conscience with art by Goran Gilgovic

The party had two goals: recover the mystical elven Tripartite Crown for their desired aboveground faction, and to search for the mythical griffin that will signal the end of the Tyrant's reign-- this was Bizmuth's current quest.

Entering the tomb, they were immediately given the choice between walking north, past an ornate mural on the wall which seemed to shine and luster, or east, down an empty hall to the room marked "102" on the map. Bizmuth beseeched Tovald for advice. He was quite wary that the lustrous painting was an obvious trap, so the party went east instead, where they found another mural, this one depicting great flying beasts circling a castle-- particularly intriguing to Bizmuth. Champion Tohma opened the door to the south within the hallway, revealing a once-fine scriptorium, with bookshelves full of rotting papyrus. In the middle of the room, the earth had been churned up by some sort of beast-- Tovald studied it briefly and concluded it was the work of massive, dangerous Dire Centipedes, which quickly led to an argument about how many legs these centipedes have. Shalsor used her innate heightened senses to determine while there were centipedes nearby, they were not immediately close. Champion Tohma found an intact scroll case on the wall, marked that it should be saved for a special occasion. Shalsor believed right now was occasion enough, and when she opened the case, the scroll inside began to lengthen as text appeared describing the events happening to the party as they happened. Soon, it changed to describing every action and thought from Shalsor's point of view. Bizmuth's quick-thinking solution was to shove the scroll into the churned earth, hoping it would block up the centipede's tunnels and thrust them out somewhere else. 

The party continued east and then north down the long hallway, encountering a door shut tight, but unlocked. Champion Tohma attempted to open it using Tovald's hatchet but was unsuccessful. When forcing the door open, the party was greeted by a series of large, spiderweb-like silvery strings spreading out from the ceiling, attempting to hold the door closed. Cutting the silvery strands apart with their swords, the party was able to fully enter into the large hallway, which opened to the north into a large cavern, to the east to a circling series of alcoves, and a series of doors to the west. 

Tomb of the Golden Ghosts Map, from His Majesty the Worm.

The party continued to the east, finding another mural on the north wall of the room marked "106" on their map. This mural depicted a group of people fleeing in terror of a giant asteroid heading towards the land. Tovald predicted perhaps the tomb itself was a vessel to hold souls fleeing from the threat of an asteroid, real or fictional, until they could be reincarnated.

This is how I imagined the mural personally.

The intrepid guild ventured into the first series of alcoves along the left-hand side of the rotunda-style room. Within, they found a series of alcoves, including one with a golden light shining through a veil. When Champion Tohma attempted to brush the veil away with his dagger, a golden, shimmering ghost crossed past it and through the Champion's dagger, hovering above the ground. It moved its incorporeal mouth in an attempt to make sounds, but none would come out. Shalsor used her preternatural senses to read its lips-- the ghost was thanking the party profusely for freeing it from control by the silvery tendrils, which seemed to have attached to the Ghost's decomposing body but had been since been cut as they entered through the wall from the previous room. Freed, it hovered north, and when asked if its friends buried in the tomb needed assistance as well, it shrugged and pointed east down the hallway to the rest of the rotunda. 

Set on freeing the rest of the golden ghosts from their predicament, the party attempted to move east to the rest of the rotunda, but before they could, they heard the sounds of screaming and running down the hall. In height order, the party of four peered around the corner, watching as a stout halfling and skinny wood elf booked it down the hall, fleeing a writing, wriggling dire centipede. The party stepped out, letting the pair of cartoonish runners pass by, before engaging the centipede. Not seconds later, and Shalsor had cast a spell which commanded the creature to eat the entire scroll that was likely expanding in the centipede tunnels. The creature promptly ran off. The halfling, Justin Pepperoni, and the elf, Finch, thanked the group for saving them, and rewarded them with a slime bomb. They'd also found a signet ring, which the elf Finch gave to Champion Tohma, much to Justin's chagrin. They were down there for the artifact, probably the same one as the party, but had decided their delve was over. They ran off back to the surface. 

The party continued on their path to the opposite end of the rotunda, first stopping at the central room. When they opened the door, they saw more silvery strands penetrating the corpses within the walls. One corpse stood up, puppeteered by the silver strands, and when the party asked if they should cut its strands, it violently shook its head. That was a good enough answer for everyone, and Tovald decided he was going to let his lightning bolt deal with the problem. (That's right-- it hadn't come up before, but Tovald had a living lightning bolt which he had to hold at all times, or else it would fly around in a path of destruction. The only rest he got from this task was when he fed the bolt an adequate amount of pepper whiskey, which wasn't very amenable to Tovald).

Shalsor and Bizmuth stood back while Champion Tohma readied himself to slam the door shut. Tovald let the lightning bolt go into the room, and Champion Tohma slammed the door shut. When they were thoroughly sure the strands and the corpses they puppeteered were destroyed, Tovald pulled out the four-pronged tongs he made to catch the lightning bolt, and Champion Tohma opened the door again. Tovald expertly caught the bolt. More Golden Ghosts appeared, thank the party, but one sat near its destroyed corpse, crying. After some communication issues, it was discovered the ghost was missing a death mask. The party decided they'd give it a look and exited the room to continue their search for the crown.

Finally, at the bottom of the rightmost rotunda room, the party came upon the Crown, sitting upon a pedestal, surrounded by depictions of the elven gods who made up the Tripartite. Below the pedestal lay a corpse, dessicated and dry, but not decomposing. When Tovald opened up the corpse for a look, he discovered its insides were still present, aged but not at all decomposed. The party deduced the crown was trapped, which they proved right when Shalsor used her magic to attempt to take the crown off the pedestal. She successfully removed it, and the other three successfully dodged the red rays of (death?) which shot out from the pedestal. Shalsor twirled the crown on her finger. 

Hoping to explore more of the dungeon, the party traversed all the way back to the door to the north of the long open room 105, descending down the sets of stairs to a room with four limp corpses on the ground, silvery strands once again gripping them from the ceiling. The party attempted to all cut the strands of the corpses at once, but one of the strands escaped Shalsor's cut, and the corpse stood up, fighting against the rest of the party. It was quickly dispatched, though not before its arm had been cut off and had been puppeteered all on its own. 

The party then ascended to room 110, where a procession of Golden Ghosts stood expectantly at the doorway. Inside the room, a chest lay at the other end, protected by an obvious boulder trap in the ceiling. Shalsor promptly tried to use her flesh-magic to disarm it, cutting off her arm at the elbow and attempting to float it up to the boulder to disarm it. Instead, the arm got stuck in the silvery strands which held the boulder aloft. Champion Tohma was able to scale the wall and disarm the trap while also recovering Shalsor's arm. Inside the chest was a collection of treasure, including a set of golden masks-- for the Golden Ghosts, it seemed. 

Returning to room 105, the party was disgusted to find the culprit of these silvery strands-- a massive brain with spiderlike legs extruding from it. The party decided it was time to bring down this horrible creature, bringing out all the stops-- Shalsor's magic, Tovald's lightning bolt, and Bizmuth's bow accosted the creature, but it took the tutelage of all of Bizmuth's mentors for her to get off the multitude of precise bow shots needed to slay the creature. 

With the creature slain, the party decided it was time to ascend from the delve for a day. They did so, coming up into the great city once again, unharmed and with a big sack of coins in their pocket. The authoritarian lackeys of the Tyrant took half of the Trabajador's gold. For this, Tovald knew they were going to need to kill those motherfuckers.

But that would have to wait for another day.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My Initial Impressions: It took way too long to finish this blog post, but I really liked this system, particularly the pre-generated characters, their in-built bonds system, and the die-less system of skill checks and combat. For all intents and purposes, doing all your dice math with tarot cards is basically novelty, but it's cool novelty. The GM's drawing of "major arcana" cards helping define random events within the dungeon sounds cool, though I haven't gotten a peak behind the curtain. I do concede it's a bit difficult how a game functionally 100% about the dungeon crawl has no mechanics for the actual act of dungeon crawling, but the combat system is superb. Hopefully we'll get to try the camp and city systems in future sessions, if I can make it for the next delve. Long live Bizmuth Mourn!

Avoiding the Slop: My 2025 TTRPG Resolutions, To Be Continued

Let's start this blog off strong, shall we?

For the first time in my life, I did some research on fair use copyright law. It's something I should probably be well-briefed on, considering I'm a person (pay no attention to the man behind the Asiatic wild dog curtain) who makes content and sometimes even posts it online. But I wasn't looking it up because I have some new intellectual property that I wanted to share with you all, I looked it up because I wanted to start this post, and this blog, with complaining and critique.

I accidentally chose a poignant time to get back into running, playing and writing content for TTRPGs, because recently they've gone so far as to be included in the United States 24-hour-news cycle in the form of NYT's D&D Rule Changes Involving Race and Identity Divide Players - The New York Times, what seems to be the end result of a long-protracted shouting match starting with the release of D&D's Player's Handbook 2024 (rules update? 5E 2024? 5.5E? who knows what to call it) and The Making of the Original Dungeons & Dragons... and then culminating in the cesspool of X / Twitter when Elon Musk chimed in with some choice words against Wizards of the Coast. 

Of course, opinions are like assholes, and I'd like to share my own on the whole debacle, fervently whistling from my corner of the internet to the masses (what, like, five of my friends?) in a concise enough manner, and then answer the question: where do we move forward from here?

Let's start with, mechanically, what got everyone all up in arms in the first place: the changes D&D writers made in their 2024 rules update to 5th Edition, and their language surrounding the makers and content of early editions of Dungeons & Dragons. It was a double whammy; Firstly, the 2024 rules update intentionally removed (and called notice to the removal of) ability score bonuses or penalties to certain ability scores based on a character's "race," changed the terminology of "race" to "species," and removed any conjunctions between a species and an ontological alignment. The tired example is that Orcs are no longer inherently inclined to "evil," brutish, or belligerent behavior-- something they were for the most part assumed to be in earlier editions. As the above NYT article states, these changes were specifically made with removing tired tropes and opening D&D to a larger, more socially conscious audience, an audience also full of people who may have been historically disenfranchised by the sort of real life societal tropes that some claim (and I agree) form the background of the tropes of ontologically evil species and peoples in fantasy as a whole. 

The second hammer to fall was the popularization of passages in the introduction of The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons, which called to notice the historical issues of concepts and language in the earliest editions of D&D (concepts and language that I would argue probably remained in some form at least until AD&D 2nd), including exclusion or mocking of non-white-middle-class-males.

So, according to certain loud voices on different spaces on the internet, WoTC, and D&D, as with all other aspects of society, "went woke." Insert comedic fart noise to make fun of the fools who espouse this stuff, Musk included.

When Musk posts, the world listens (which is exactly what he wants, but it's not the time to complain about brand manipulation through shock value); we now have our NYT article, published in the aftermath of this issue, on the second-to-last-day of the year. On a second reading, it's actually a pretty good article. But as the 495-comments-and-growing show, it has already (and will likely continue to) light a fire under the collective ass of D&D and larger TTRPG community fans who want to complain about Wizard's "Woke D&D," which may or may not light the fire under the ass of people who want to complain about those complainers. My ass, it seems, is currently ablaze.

But I don't want it to be. Maybe it's the spirt of the end of the year and the renewal of 2025, maybe it's just being plain tired of it, or maybe it's wanting to pretend like I don't care about this sort of slop, but I do really want to move on. Surely, there must be greener pastures somewhere out there then having to post a reactionary paragraph in discord So, I ask myself: where do we move forward from here? 

Well, I can't tell anyone else where to move forward from here. But I can certainly try to write out what I'm going to do for myself. Call it my 2025 TTRPG resolutions, because that's catchy, and now it's the title of this post. And all you have to do, my loyal reader, is let me know what you think down in that comments section below (Ho ho, I really am a content creator now!)  What are your 2025 TTRPG resolutions? Are mine full of shit? Let me know. 

Dhole's 2025 TTRPG Resolutions

 1. Don't click on the bait-- clickbait, as it were. In the landscape of YouTube, my top social media platform, some larger content creators in the TTRPG sphere report on this sort of stuff because it's poignant, it's topical, it has value, and most importantly, it gets views from chronically online reactionaries like me. So, my first resolution: let's stay away from that. I'm going to try to stick to content creators who are smart enough to stay away from those sorts of topics, which also seem to be the smaller creators, so "YIPEE!" for supporting smaller content creators. 

2. Don't use "Dungeons & Dragons" as a universal term. Dungeons & Dragons, especially in the YouTube space, seems to me to have become the universal term for the larger world of fantasy TTRPGs, whether they're talking Shadowdark, Old School Essentials, or anything that isn't Pathfinder (Pathfinder is Pathfinder). This kinda ticks me off, because in a community where the modern trend is to disparage THE GAME WITH THE TITLE DUNGEONS & DRAGONS PRODUCED BY WIZARDS OF THE COAST, (especially 5th edition), and recommend TTRPGs which bring something newer, or more fresh, or more accessible, to the modern landscape, some folks continue to use the moniker D&D for all Fantasy TTRPGs. I hypothesize they do this because it gets the clicks, which is all fine and dandy, but I really want to find a way to introduce different Fantasy TTRPGs to new players without calling it "Dungeons & Dragons," or saying it's "like Dungeons & Dragons." My first inclination-- how does "tabletop fantasy adventure game" sound? I bet you all can come up with something better.

3. Separate the art from the megacorporation, when it comes to 5E 2014 / 2024 Dungeons and Dragons. Woe is me, because some days, it feels hard to be what my friend magnificienttophat calls a "D&D Enjoyer," crucially separated from a "D&D fan." Indeed, despite the fact that I, too, want to play other games sometimes, I actually really do enjoy modern Dungeons & Dragons, and not just because I've never played anything else! It's difficult to be an enjoyer when you know that Wizards, as well as its parent Hasbro, are working their asses off to make D&D into a product with the most appeal to the greatest number of buyers possible, and not for what I'd consider the right reasons-- not even to mention their series of corporate power abuses, whether it be laying off 1,000 workers before the holiday season, or the OGL debacle, or the Pinkerton incident. But I believe despite this, the writers of 2025 D&D have done a good job making a system that's understandable (to the initiated) AND brings what I'm looking for to the table in terms of fun. As such, I won't stop myself from playing the game, beyond trying to limit my support of the megacorporation that surrounds the current WoTC D&D team. 

3.5 (heh heh) Don't be afraid to try to introduce people to 5E 2024. To add to my above statement-- I do want to play D&D 2024, because I think the rules update is, in my opinion, a strict upgrade from 2014, even with the limitations that come with the lack of expansions. So, despite the controversy of Wizards and 5E 2024, I won't balk at trying to introduce it to others who are willing to give it a shot. 

4. Get into homebrewing rules-- even in more complicated systems. I've never been a huge homebrew guy when it comes to rules and mechanics in TTRPGs. I like making characters, monster stat blocks, scenarios, settings, stories-- but new mechanics? You're telling me I have to make them and then introduce MORE rules to my players that are already having trouble with the monotony of the core rules? Yes, you say, this is a D&D 5th edition problem. But I think I want to challenge myself to bend the rules a little more, and suit them better to my liking-- it starts with accepting that 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons is not a game for new players-- if I'm going to introduce someone to D&D 2024 from now on, I'm already going to be placing a fair level of rules complexity on them-- I already had been, I'd just been kidding myself about it. Why not add something a little different on there, if done with careful consideration?

5. Experiment with lethality in fantasy TTRPGs. I'm new to the dungeon crawl sort of lethality implicit in lots of OSR games, which I've played a fair amount of recently. I want to experiment with that, both mechanically and philosophically-- how can death in a dungeon crawl remain impactful, while also not feeling cheap and overly common? Something to think about (and post about) in the future. 

6. Think about trying Pathfinder. Yes, this is an open invitation for someone to run it for me-- because I don't want to buy more books (and you will soon learn, dear blog reader, that I fucking hate PDFs). 

7. Focus on setting cohesion. Fortunately for you, blog reader, not all the content I plan to post on this blog or write in full is focused on RPG philosophy. I want to continue to expand on the fantasy TTRPG setting I've been workshopping in my head since my highschooler days-- the Fading Kingdom, as I'm calling it now, which is just beginning to come to a sort of fruition. I want to continue to write for that setting, and I want to really focus on creating a setting that is not a kitchen sink of so many elements, because if it was, I might as well just write all my content for the Forgotten Realms. So, I'm going to work on that this year, and hopefully you'll get to join me for the journey. 

Gee, I sure hope I can edit this post later, because I am tired of writing and ready to post, but I am sure I will add more resolutions to this list in time. Until then, kudos folks! 

- Dhole

Introduction

    On Christmas morning in 2014, I pulled a copy of the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Player's Handbook out of my stocking. My mother had chosen it for me because my uncle (her brother) had played D&D's earlier editions in his youth-- and to be frank, she knew I was a nerd :) . Over the past ten years, my enjoyment for these sorts of games of pen-and-paper origin has fluctuated-- video games, birding, hiking, just plain school-- I've channeled energy to other interests. But recently, I've re-entered a sort of TTRPG-enjoyment-renaissance, found myself making questionable purchase decisions on a host of new systems, settings, and supplements (Systems & Supplements role-playing game?) and digging back into what I enjoy. I've even had ideas for content I can maybe finish! That's a big deal for me.

    So, with that in mind, here's Dhole's Rolls: a TTRPG miscellany that I hope you'll enjoy. Some things to expect over the next few weeks:

    - Some supplementary content for D&D 5.5e

    - Fantasy TTRPG setting stuff, adventures, ideas

    - some Root RPG content

    - eventually, more!