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The Universal NPC Emulator was suggested by one of The Tavern's YouTube viewers, and all I can say is, where has this been for my entire career as a DM? It's short, clocking in at 18 pages, of which 8 contain the tables you'll refer to.

When I discuss free and PWYW resources that should be part of every GM's toolkit, the Universal NPC Emulator goes to the top of that pile. Don't hesitate. Grab it before you run your next game session, no matter the system you use.

UNE is the Universal NPC Emulator. With just a handful of dice rolls, UNE can help create a surprising non-player character (NPC) with its own motivations. A few more dice rolls, and UNE can provide more direction to place the newly-created NPC smack dab in the center of the story. It can even help determine the NPC’s general mood towards the player characters.

Best of all UNE is system and setting agnostic. It will work in Techno-Roman science fiction just as well as 1930′s Cthulhu hour or apocalypse fantasy.

Examples and more tutorials for UNE can be found on the Conjecture Games Facebook page!

Pay-What-You-Want Conjecture - this product is free. Download with a clear conscience! If you want to "pay" without money, please review, rate, or leave feedback for this product. However, if you really like this product consider throwing a couple bucks to help pay for DriveThru's hosting costs, art in future products, and beer to make future products.

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 "Thirteen Parsecs: Beyond the Solar Frontier is the latest tabletop role playing game project from Elf Lair Games, producers of Night Shift: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars  and Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age. It forms the third of our trilogy of core games - we've given you modern and fantasy, and now we bring sci-fi to the forefront with the same rules, Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

By ScarletRevense
Melpomene Gaming
Outcast Silver Raiders

The outcasts encounter an isolated farming community where apocalyptic dogma has evolved into a growing apocalyptic reality. If the outcasts cannot shut down this sect, the danger may creep out into the larger world, perhaps even dooming the Mythic North as a whole.

Wormwood & Gall is a twelve page adventure inside of a 42 page digest zone devoted to Outcast Silver Raiders. It’s try to present this edgy biblical apocalypse thing. Instead it is just coming off as a small series of encounters in which nothing ever really happens. Good luck with your tribulation!

Maybe Outcast is everything I wanted Mork Borg to be? Creativity, but this time cloaked in the aspect of a real adventure? Except, it’s not a very GOOD adventure.

So you show up at his village. Seems a little quiet. Maybe if you ask around and make some rolls and do a good job roleplaying you can find out that the local priest, Ljsdfjgsd, summoned everyone up to old Ahjsgfsdg’s farm. Heading up there to the Ahjsgfsdg’s  place you eventually find some villagers in the middle of an apocalyptic fervor. After a more differenter villager tells you exactly what is going on. You stumble about from place to place, meet someone hiding, and then move on to the next place. 

Or, maybe, in the second hook, you show up in the village/farm because someone told you that a rock fell from the sky in the woods behind Ahjsgfsdg’s farm. ARGGG!!! You know, the adventure is trying to do this whole apocalypse thing, replete with the four horsemen, and then it goes and undercuts the entire thing by telling the party, explicitly, in the hook, that they are going there because of a rock in the woods. Well then, I guess thats what the fuck caused it and where the fuck we should go, right? Look, the rest of this adventure is not great, but, still, you don’t put the fucking twist ending to the suspense movie in the fucking trailer, do you?

And, as I have intimated, the NPC names are off the hook. I am open to being told that these make sense in the context of the designers country (I assume this is up Nordic way, anyway) but fuck man, its going all Forgotten Realms on me. I am NOT going to use your fucked up names. No, it doesn’t have to be Bill and Frank. But you gotta do things to make it easieron the DM rto run the fucking thing.

And, speaking of the fucking NPC’s, they suck. The adventure is supposed to, I think, run as a kind of open ended thing. The party stumbles about, meets some people trying to do something and other people interfere, etc. Except the people here are sooo loosy goosy htat you can’t do that. They don’t really have meaningful goals. I’m not even sure “bring out the tribulation” is a goal of anyone. The vast majority are hiding or cowering in some dark corner. Seriously, at one point I thought “the NPC in this room will be cowering in the corner.” Sure enough, they were. Anyway, they don’t DO anything. The big congregation scene in the barn has a bunch of villagers and a giant virgin mary weeping blood or some shit. That’s it. Yeah, I guess preacher kAksjdfhkdsh could rally them to kill the party. But he’s off elsewhere. Where you meet him. And likely stab him. 

There’s just nothing HAPPENING. Well, besides the cowering. You go someplace and someone or some thing interesting is there, but they are all isolated from each other. The giant blood weeping virgin mary statue in the barn. GREAT!  Nothing to it though. You meet a dude who is smeaty and obviously looks like hes having a heart attack and about to die. GREAT! If you mention him looking like that then he DOES have a heart attack and die. GREAT! These kind of individual elements are all great. Solid anchors to work from. But there is no follow on. He’s nothing but an NPC. The statue does nothing. It’s just all something weird, or someone weird, and nothing more form there,

And, speaking of that hook ruining things … the very first encounter at the room. Roo one. The first thing you are likely to meet … is a chick you tells you EVERYTHING that is going on at the farm. The preacher, ghost, the falling star, images in the mind manifesting. Shes got it all. No discovery for you, Mr Party! No slowly unfolding drama! No rising crescendo to a release.! 

Did I mention it’s digest. In two column format. With a tiny font. And long italics. And, even better, the PDF is spreads only, Jesus, I had this thing zoomed in a bajillionfold just to be able to see the fucking text. And, even better, you don’t NEED spreads! It doesn’t take advantage of that. It’s fucking digital man, make a page version available also.

Decent individual elements here. And I can see where the designer wanted to go with the apocalypse thing, and the villagers, and rivals and so on. But it’s so unsupported as to be goals and wants that mere suggestions of ideas. Those parts, the interactions, needed A LOT more support, perhaps even with a timeline. And some stakes that matter beyond Saving The World. There’s no reason to be here or to give a shit. And even THAT isn’t played up. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. Taint got no preview. Sucker.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/515517/altar-issue-1-for-outcast-silver-raiders?1892600

I love the entire run of the Black Pudding zine—the art, the layout, and the unconventional thinking. The whole line is classic J.V. West.

New monsters, new magics, a new class, an adventure, NPCs, and even a setting await you within the 28 pages of Black Pudding #5. Snag it for free, but trust me, you'll return for more (the whole Black Pudding line is PWYW) and likely leave a tip.

Dripping and dolloping into view comes the latest issue of this old school RPG zine chock full of nasty goodies for your classic fantasy games!

In this issue you'll see ipzees and orbii, you'll learn aromatic charms, you'll find weapons of magic, many strange people will offer their services for your adventuring party, and you will absolutely encounter some cackling ice witches.

Monsters, treasure, adventures, spells, hirelings, character sheet... everything but dice is included in this tasty concoction of gelatinized madness.

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 "Hell Tanner isn't the sort of guy you'd mistake for a hero: he's a fast-driving car thief, a smuggler, and a stone-cold killer. He's also expendable “ at least in the eyes of the Secretary of Traffic for the Nation of California. Tanner doesn't care much for those eyes. You'd also never mistake Hell Tanner for a humanitarian. Facing life in prison for his various crimes, he's given a Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

I was a teenager in the 80s when Helloween dropped. We didn't say "dropped" back then. I was 16 when I saw their video for Halloween on MTV's Headbanger's Ball. I'm quite sure being on the Ball is what propelled them into fame.

But this isn't a post about Helloween. It's a post about the artist Frederick Moulaert, a Belgian who drew lots of fun cartoony art for the band Helloween. I had completely forgotten about those ad spots and CD case drawings. But dammit, Frederick was killing it in those days. The one that stands out in my memory the most was of a woman leap-frogging a pumpkin. You know the one, you metalheads out there.

So it looks like Frederick has his time in the spotlight in the late 80s, in terms of doing heavy metal art. Then he moved on to other things and currently I believe he's mostly a website designer. My selfish brain badly wants him to do a bunch more lowbrow comic art, though.

In terms of style, he's solidly European. He did some art for Fluide Glacial and Spirou. His work would fit perfectly into an issue of Heavy Metal, but I'm not sure he ever did anything for that magazine.

Delver Magazine is an OSE zine filled with random tables, charts, and an adventure. Priced at PWYW, it's another piece of every good DM's toolkit.

Delver Magazine is a bi-monthly (6 issues per year) resource for GMs of Old School RPG fantasy games such as Old-School Essentials, Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game, and other OSR games. Each issue will include a ready-to-play adventure, printable props, random charts & tables, articles, and maps for the included adventure.

Table of Contents for Issue #1

----- Random Charts & Tables -----

• That Ogre is Waving
• Listen! You Smell Something?
• Strange Map
• Gurch's Anvil
• Strange Place for a Crate
• Keeping Watch
• That Skeleton Looks Familiar!
• A Shady Character
• Ixra's Wondrous Tomes
• Nemesis: Fighter
• Strange Statue
• Wanted
• The Ally: Cleric
• The Auction House
• The Figure in the Corner
• Merchant: Binga
• Town Militia
• Agnaddob's Artifact Emporium
• Library of Niloshis Whisperwalk

----- Article(s) -----

The Referee Roundtable - Bring the Fantastic to your Settings

----- Adventure -----

Secret of the Shattered Fist Monastery - 18 page adventure

Priced at PWYW, Delver Magaine #1 should be in every DM's toolkit. It's in mine!

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I've got the Stalwart Phile #3 now posted, and I am very pleased with this model for building the game going forward. Obviously, I based these on the old Marvel FASERIP Marvel Phile from Dragon Magazine, and it's a great format for me to work in. I can take a weekend and cobble one of these together, getting a substantive release out without feeling the burden of a 'complete' release. 

The companion adventures, of which I have done two (one is exclusive to KS backers) is working under similar conditions; these are long enough to represent an individual comic book issue, but short enough that I don't get bogged down in getting halfway through a draft and then giving up. I have a model in place that I can keep building on, and that was important to me to keep the game growing. If all I do is Stalwart Philes and short adventures, there's a solid foundation for the game to grow going forward.

Mars is a massively dangerous place to dungeon crawl & adventuring down in the ruins. This blog post picks up from this blog post. So we've been working with Warriors of the Red Planet and taking advantage of the multi WoRP races and PC classes. This is a great system to run full on post apocalyptic rpg campaigns. To this end I've been rereading Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

Many gamers understand that the Cepheus Engine is an open ruleset based on Mongoose Travellers' open ruleset. As such, the Cepheus 2d6 system can get turned and twisted into interesting directions. The Sword of Cepheus 2e is one of those interesting directions, as it turns a ruleset designed for space opera into one more suited for Swords & Sorcery, Sword & Planet, or even Swords & Sandals.

The Sword of Cepheus 2nd Edition is today's Deal of the Day at DTRPG. Usually priced at $20 in PDF, it is on sale for $10 until tomorrow morning.

The Sword of Cepheus is a roleplaying game in the triple “Sword” genres: Sword and Sorcery, Sword and Planet, and Sword and Sandal. In Sword and Sorcery, often-amoral protagonists face vile sorcery and horrid beasts as they complete awesome adventures for gold and glory. In Sword and Planet, humans finding themselves on barbaric or decadent alien planets use their superior brawn and valiant hearts to win fame, fortune, and the heart of an alien princeling. In Sword and Sandal, often set in a quasi-Biblical or faux-Roman world, men and women with sharp wits and strong sword-arms fight mythological creatures and overthrow tyrants. The common threads of all three genres are the blade-wielding protagonists who use their brawn, as well as brains, to fight foes both supernatural and mundane and undertake hair-raising, violent adventures.

The Sword of Cepheus rules include everything you need to play thrilling sword & sorcery adventures:

• Streamlined skill-based 2d6 task resolution!
• Customizable character generation with 12 archetypal careers for your character to undergo!
• 12 non-human species with their own careers!
• 40 unique character Traits to further personalize your character!
• A wide selection of adventuring equipment and weaponry!
• Simple yet intriguing rules for adventuring and exploring exciting worlds!
• Fast-paced, action-packed combat - whether on foot, from horseback, or on the high seas!
• A skill-based, perilous sorcery system, with 28 powerful Arcane spells and 18 reality-shattering Eldritch spells!
• Risk disastrous magical mishaps and mutate as vast eldritch power flows through your sorcerous body!
• 95 terrible monsters for daring heroes to face!
• A selection of treasures, including a selection of powerful magical artifacts!
• Detailed Encounter Rules to keep adventuring exciting and fresh, for both players and Referees!

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By Mauro Longo
Black Pepper Game Studio
OSE
Levels 1-3 Ha!

Twelve Dead Make One Alive, the rhyme says. Adventurers soon learn there is a grim truth at its core. Far from civilization, deep within the shadowy depths of the Grimwald Forest, lies the ominous Black Mill, an abandoned place shrouded in whispered tales of dark magic and spectral hauntings. The unwary who venture to explore the Mill must overcome its sinister perils and disturbing inhabitants: the Black Miller and its Twelve Dead, who dwell within its moldy walls…

This 78 page adventure uses about thirty two pages to describe thirty pages in a mill compound stuffed full of undead. Looks pretty. Seems to have a nice format. But its just mostly a hackfest with enemies WAYYY out of your league with a layout style that actually makes the fucking thing MORE confusing.

Seems that a hundred or so years ago the old miller made a deal with a dude named Avery Goodman. In return for killing twelve people he gets blah blah blah. He does so, the twelve rise, and kill him. He comes back to unlife. Avery shows up again and makes the same deal with the newly undead twelve: kill twelve each and you get to come back to life. Now, a hundred years on, they’ve almost killed 144 people. They are short the parties number … Not a bad setup for a locale. We got ol Goodman, a shady miller and vengeful undead with a mission all running around an old mill compound. A little bit of folklore to kick things off, yeah? Fear not, that’s not going anywhere and isn’t really going to ever pop up again. Sure, there’s a nice ring of twelve graves in the basement, a tunnel full of 140 corpses, some hearts to destroy and a couple of contracts with Goodman that you can burn, but the folklore elements pretty much dies out in the backstory.

The map is going to illustrate a lot of the issues with the adventure. It looks fine. There are monster names on it. (Yeah, I love it when I can tell easily which monsters nearby might react to the party in the next room!) and some icons indicating locked, stuck, and open doors. Hey, this all sounds great yeah? Sure. But the map is small. The monsters and creatures are kind of on top of each other in many cases. One room with a red dragon and the next with a blue and the next with a black, all within thirty feet of each other, or, the level 1-3 equivalent of that, with undead. And then all of those icons? They just kind of get in the way for the most part. Locked, stuck, I’m not sure that’s information that’s needed on the map AND in the text? It reminds me for all the world of the folks who use like eight different colored box types to denote read-aloud, hidden information, monster stats and so on. It becomes distracting and eventually makes the thing harder to use.  And then the map, proper, after all of that, is just hard to read. The pencil lines, the lines on the map that make up the details of the rooms, the walls, doors, and the like, come off as a very light stroke weight. These will be the issues of the main adventure as well: something that at first glance looks great but then ends up being less than that. A lot less than that.

But first, the difficulty level. I find it hard to believe this was ever playtested. It’s listed as level one to three. That is repeated in several places. As I bitch, note, we could just bump this up to 3-5 or something and I’d shut up. But, the lack of playtesting here … It’s meant to complete in one session and in one evening. There are twelve core undead to defeat plus, maybe, a few more. Well, hang on. Once you arrive at the mill, and the mechanics set it up so that you WILL arrive at night/sunset, you can’t really leave again. Save vs spells, at -4, to find your way back through the woods again, otherwise the evil conspires to lead you back. Plus, there’s a wraith in the woods that attacks you if you try to leave. And no real place inside the mill to rest. You are really kind of doing a one and done thing here. I guess you could kill the wood wraith and get the fuck out, trying over and over again until you make that save vs spells at -4. Oh, and then the next time you show up the wraith is back again. The undead come back fully each night. So, you’re in, probably. With multiple wraiths inside You know, four HD, energy drain, magic to hit? Those wraith. It suggested using The Gaborians alternate rules for energy drain, but even that is gonna smart. How about a 6HD giant leech? There’s something like nineteen creature encounters, some with groups and some individually. This fucking shit is gonna be ROUGH. Even a hit and run loot is gonna be hard. You can make something hard, but you also gotta give them out or else you are deathtrapping a group of ones. Smart play doesn’t matter when your group of four one’s face all of the colors of the ancient dragons with no way out. 

There’s no real overview of the mill. There are individual locations, on the outer walls, on either side of the mill, but, coming upon the mill there’s no real vista overview descriptions of the place. I guess you just wander in at location number one and go from there? Speaking of location one … there’s a murder of crows there ready to kill you. And some bandits in the woods ready to kill you. And a wraith wandering around ready to kill you. I guess this is just “whats going on in the woods” but its weird in that it all sounds like its all just mashed up there in location one. And then there’s the fucking stables. The stables and the hallway outside of them are, like, five feet apart. But we get two separate encounters here … one with a skeleton horse in it. If you can fucking see it from where you are, and its meaningful, then you need to note it even if its not in your room.

It’s full of long italics, and we all know by now how much I hate that, I find it hard to read in longer sections, and that holds true here. The propose gets purple in it also, here and there, on a more than regulate occurrence. “A rickety well curb is located at its center, and distant eerie wails echo all around when the rain beats softer.” This isn’t a novel here folks. And even if it were it would be a purple one. Lets keep the descriptions grounded. I’m all for allegory and metaphor and the nonstandard use of language to impart a vibe, but purple don’t do it. And Jesus H Christ, every single time you meet one of the twelve, so, twelve times, we get a little description about how they come back to life the next day. Fuck me man, i got it. You’re just padding it out. Plus, you explain the mechanic like three times in the text BEFORE we even get to the fucking keys. It’s all fucking padding. “The trapdoor is still perfectly functional, and once discovered, it can be opened and closed at will.” Yes, things that we would expect to work normally do, in fact, work normally. It’s just fucked up padding.

The layout here, the formatting, is a major pain. At first is SEEMS like a good idea. A little section of read alound, set aside in italics, with some points bolded. And then the text follows up with sections with headers of those bolded sections. But it’s SO trivial. There is SO much going on and the text for each of them is SO long. It ends up being more confusing than if you didn’t do that .It just drones on and on, and mixes the important with the trivial window dressing. The formatting was a good idea, but it was so tortured and misused that it makes the mess bigger. I’m am seriously MORE confused by it. Again, it’s like those color coded text boxes in some adventures, seems like a good idea but isnt/

Ultimately, this is just a hack. You can talk to a couple of them, but, mostly, you’ll be stabbing undead and some vermin. The only real interactivity beyond that is burning their hearts, which are located together in the same room, where their graves are. And they respawn. So you gotta kill them twice. 

Levels 1-3 my ass. As a much higher level adventure, that is primarily a hack, meh. I still think its lipstick on a bullette.

This is $15 at DriveThru. The preview is nine pages. You get to see the level one map and the background. No encounters shown, so, poor preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/515518/mill-of-the-twelve-dead?1892600

It's challenging to quantify Black Pudding #4. Is it a zine? Is it a rules supplement? Is it a rules substitute? It could be all of the above. All that, and it is priced at PWYW!

Random tables? Check!

New classes? Check!

Old classes with new skins? Check!

New Races? Check!

Potential hirelings? Yep!

A James West character sheet? You bet ya!

The die hits the table... a 1! A sound emanates from 2d6 x 10 feet down the dungeon corridor. What wandering, shlorping oozoid is this? It's a new Black Pudding. Get your torches ready.

In this issue you get new classes, a double helping of Meatshields, and a 15 page OSR play book, complete with the basic classes, rules, and Black Pudding flavor to enhance or replace your current play book. For use with dice of funny sides. Inspired by games such as Labyrinth Lord, The Black Hack, and Swords & Wizardry White Box.

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The original version of this post appeared in March of 2015...

I've written previously about a world where the dungeoneering was an done by androids who were the remnant of human civilization (all that's here). Well, there's another way to get dungeons crawling with robots, and that's by having a future, post-apocalyptic world that's been overrun by them. Instead of apes, or fairies, or vampires, let the robots take over something like Screamers (and the Philip K. Dick story it's based on "The Second Variety"), Terminator, or Magnus: Robot-Fighter. Unlike those examples though, human civilization can have been pushed back to pseudo-Medieval levels.

Say the robots have moved mostly underground, leaving humans to limp along on a damaged surface world. The underground bases of the robots would be a lot like dungeons. Robots would have made various robotic or bio-robotic guardians--monsters, of sorts. Maybe the robots are even aliens? A post-sentient, techno-organic swarm that landed and buried itself into the earth, spreading underground like roots, building robotic creatures in a myriad of forms as it went. You'd have a whole underground ecology of robots. Add "magic" (really psionic powers in disguise) and you've got a fantasy world, or close enough.

For a real fantasy world, assume that the alien robotic swarm invaded a fairly D&Dish world (except with maybe less conflict to begin with).

In the late '80s, one of the game systems I played (ran) was Rolemaster, although it was often merged with MERPS. Of course, we always used the critical tables from Rolemaster. Rolling a "66" was always magical. :)

Against the Darkmaster—Quickstart is priced at PWYW and is a love poem to the classic RoleMaster system. You know you want it :)

Return to the Classic Game of Fantasy Adventure!

Against the Darkmaster is an Epic Fantasy role-playing game of high adventures, eldritch magic, and heavy metal combat.

Inspired by the classic fantasy sagas and 80s fantasy movies, Against the Darkmaster is built for heroic action and intense, character driven campaigns.

The Against the Darkmaster Deluxe Quickstart Rules include everything you need to start playing. In fact, it could well be a full RPG! This beautifully illustrated 122-page PDF includes:

Character creation rules and options;

Detailed rules for travels, combat, and adventuring;

A complete magic system, with over 100 spells;

Attack tables and Critical Strikes;

Dozens of creatures for your heroes to face.

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I have to say that the entire Sly Flourish catalogue is full of gems for the improv DM. Sly Flourish's Fantastic Locations is a gem that is a bargain today! Normally 9.99 in PDF, Fantastic Locations is on sale for $3 until 11AM ET tomorrow (April 11th).

For those who don't know, I am an improv DM by nature, and material like this is my bread and butter when running a session or campaign.

We RPG game masters have a lot of tools to help us run our roleplaying games. Our monster books and bestiaries give us piles of foes to throw at our adventurers. The various guides for game masters often give us non-player characters, treasures, and story-building tips.

One of the hardest parts of game mastering, however, is coming up with interesting adventure locations for our characters to explore. These locations need to be fantastic, detailed places that capture the minds of our players every session we run. Good locations are hard to improvise and often hard to strip out of a fully-fleshed-out adventure.

Sly Flourish’s Fantastic Locations is a book, available in PDF and print-on-demand, that gives you twenty system-agnostic locations to drop into your favorite fantasy roleplaying game. Each location builds on a fantastic theme, such as a mysterious ancient structure under the ice, a cursed castle of a mad king, a fallen celestial fortress, and a dwarven mine that cracked into the tomb of a dead god. Each location includes artwork by Brian Patterson of D20Monkey. Sometimes this artwork takes the form of maps. Sometimes it's an overlook of a specific location.

These sites and structures aren’t full adventures. Instead, you and your players build your own stories in these fantastic locations, then you populate them with the monsters that fit your story.

Thanks to the support of 779 backers on Kickstarter this book was expanded to include a total of twenty locations each with full color artwork.

This book is system agnostic. You can use it in just about any fantasy roleplaying game.

Please note that this book does not contain maps for these locations. This was done on purpose to give you greater flexibility choosing the chambers you wanted to use for shorter or longer games.

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Castles & Crusades is one of the granddaddies of the OSR. I often refer to it as proto-OSR, as it still firmly clung to its 3rd edition roots while striving to emulate classic play. In any case, C&C is an excellent choice of system if one is looking to play something that feels much like AD&D 1e. You can use most AD&D books (DMG, MM, FF, etc.) with few or no conversions.

The Castles & Crusades Players Handbook 7th Printing is available in PDF at PWYW pricing. You can grab it for free, and you can always tip later if you feel so inclined.

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By Aaron Gustwiller
Aaron's Gaming Stuff
S&W
Levels 2-3

Recently, and much to the despair of the nearest residents, a Young Red Dragon, Malurax, has taken up residence within the ruins. Shortly after moving in, the young dragon began preying on the livestock of the local peasantry, driving many to the brink of ruin. Harold, one of these peasants, called a fool by some but egged on by others, decided to try and slay the beast himself, but never returned. 

This eight page adventure uses two pages to describe nine rooms in a young dragons lair. It flirts with some decent imagery at times but comes off very flat. It’s just a room with a drgon in it.

Ok, so, good on Harold! I bitch all the time about the locals not taking their fate in their own hands. And, it just goes to show you … sometimes you get the dragon and most of the time the dragon gets you. But, still, I admire Harold. We don’t get anything about Harold, but, I’d have loved to have seen some shit about Harold being desperate, in dept, loansharks on his ass, or hating his wife, or great with the local always volunteering and stuff. And then some shit about finding harolds body. And, maybe, the villagers caring more about Harold than they do the party at the end. These are the things that really ground an adventure and tha ta DM can really riff on. I guess the fact that I’m brining it up at all means that it DID spark some interesting thoughts for play, but, as always, I want the designer doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. Or, better said, some medium lifting through heavy work.

And. then, there’s the dragon. At levels two or three. That’s an AC2 (ouch!) and 9HD 18HP dragon. What is that, like, 18HP of damage, save for halfsies? I’m not sure that halfsies is gonna matter. There are some giant bats present in one of the rooms, but other than that it’s just a dragon sitting on its hoard. (Which, I appreciate. The classics are always the best.) Anyway, this is gonna take some work. Any dumbass party is gonna get cooked. You’re gonna have to go in with some poisoned cows or some shit. Or a fuck ton of men at arms. Which you aint getting at the local village (not detailed.) That AC2 man. Ooph. That’s gonna be a rough one. But, hey, at least you’re not a dirt farmer!

The villagers offer some cash for killing the dragon. 600gp as I recall. And you get 1200xp for turning down the gold. *hrumph* Not a fan of imposing morality in an adventure. There ARE gods in D&D, and an afterlife, so, I guess there IS a morality inherent in a land without Neitzsche. But it just seems wrong. 

The map has some small castle ruins, just the ouline of walls really, running up to a creek with a hole in a cliff wall and six chambers inside of it. There are a couple of loops, and a couple os passages that the dragon can’t get down .. .which, as the adventure points out, is not true for the dragons breathe weapon. Still, it offers some opportunities. It is, in the end, just a lair map.

Room one, the courtyard of the ruins. “Scattered around the ruin’s courtyard are the bones of cows, horses and sheep.” Ok, so, we’re going minimalistic here. Nice concept, with the bones of the livestock the dragon has been preying on. I could use a little more viscereal in it though. Room two, the ruines of a small one room building in the courtyard: “ Inside the ruined building are the remains of a half-eaten horse, being picked at by crows. The crows fly away when a

character enters the doorway.” So, a little bit of padding here. But, the crows, dead horse, and them flying off? That’s good. It SEEMS dynamic even if it is still static. That is the extent of those two descriptions. There is nothing more to those rooms. We’re clearly working up to the dragon. Adding some foreboding and such. Not bad, but still a little lacking if were just gonna shove a dragon in a room on the inside. Which is what hte adventure does.

Room three, the stream crossing from the ruins in to the cliffside cave mouth:  The land bridge between the ruins and the lair entrance is made up of dirt and the scattered remains of the castle walls that washed away in the flood. The footprints of a small dragon can be clearly seen in the dirt.” This is a little interesting, from an evocative standpoint. Land bridge, dirt, huge chunks of stone. Th dragons footprints could be a little more ominous, but, I’ll take on that challenge.

I won’t do all of nine rooms, but I’ll do one more “ There is a pool of murky water in the southwest corner of the room. The pool is about 1ft deep.” With just nine rooms I think I’d like to see just a little bit more going on. Some viscera? Harolds body? The dragon is kind of an afterthought. Just The dragon sitting on its hoard, with no description beyond that.

Not much lead in at all here beyond what you’ve read in the intro. A little bit of “theres a dragon here” window dressing in the ruins, but not much at all in the cave. And then an aggressively minimalistic approach to the descriptions. With just nine rooms to work with, it feels like more could have been with the lead in, or to build an environment in which the characters and dragon face off. I’m not the biggest fan of set pieces, but, a nine room set piece, or some room count like that, could have been an interesting concept. (I wasn’t exactly mad at some of the 4e adventure concepts in which encounters spanned a larger larger with multiple chambers) 

You’re not really buying anything here. Figuratively or literally.

This is free at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/515288/malurax-lair?1892600

I’m gonna keep on dancing

  Let's pick it up right from here on the blog for our  Trey Causey's Strange Stars Stars Without Number campaign. This ties in with  the Reticulans of the Terra Arisen campaign setting.The idea here is that the Reticulans control more then one of the hyperspacial gateways of their empire. The Reticulan empire is still economically solvent because of Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

There’s been a lot of noise lately about the one-hour torch timer in Shadowdark, and most of it comes from people who haven’t actually played the game. I keep pointing this out because once you do, it becomes immediately clear that the torch rule is not arbitrary. It is essential to how the game creates tension, risk, and atmosphere.

In Shadowdark, darkness is not just mood lighting. It is danger. When the torches go out, the game enters the Deadly condition. That is a defined mechanical state where the GM begins checking for random encounters every crawling round. You are no longer just exploring. You are in survival mode, and every moment counts. 

What makes this even more powerful is that no one in Shadowdark has darkvision. There is no fallback. No elf cutting through the dark. No wizard spamming a Light cantrip for free. The Light spell does exist, but like a torch, it only lasts one hour of real time and takes a spellcasting check. You carry a torch or a lantern, or you are blind. That is it. Darkness is not an inconvenience. It is a countdown to danger.

This is why the real-time torch timer matters. It is a shared, objective measure that every player can see. You have one hour of light. When it ends, the Deadly condition begins. If torch duration were left up to the GM’s judgment, it would feel inconsistent or punitive. You might get ten minutes one session and twenty the next, all depending on how the GM is feeling. That kind of uncertainty makes the danger feel unfair.

With a set timer, the pressure becomes part of the game. Players make real decisions. Do we press deeper or turn back now? Do we use our last torch or save it for the way out? Time becomes a resource just like hit points or spells, and the looming threat of darkness shapes the entire dungeon experience.

This mechanic is not a gimmick. It is not nostalgia for the sake of it. It is good design. The torch timer gives structure to the danger. It supports the core loop of risk and reward. It turns exploration into a timed challenge without needing any extra mechanics. And most importantly, it makes the dungeon feel alive, hostile, and real. 

If you have only read the rulebook but never played with the torch burning down in real time, then you have not truly experienced what makes Shadowdark different. Let the light fade. Let the dungeon go Deadly. Only then will you understand why the torch timer is not just a rule. It is the heartbeat of the game.

I am looking at how Stalwart Phile #2/3 and Stalwart Adventures #2 can work together. I have the idea for a time-travel adventure that isn't a time-travel adventure at all. The idea is that there are two events that are linked by a few decades, and the adventure takes you through the linkage. Here's the idea of how these might fit together so far...

Act 1 - Decades ago, on one of their final missions, Freedom's Four defeat Doctor Voltus in his castle by trapping him in a closed cicruit system within his castle; they know it is a temporary fix.

Cut Scene 1 - In the present, the modern-day heroes (or Doc Stalwart if playing solo) meet with the retired older Liberty Lass and Bronze Beacon 2, who recount one of their final battles; we learn that Captain Reicher is up to something, and that something might be bringing back Doctor Voltus. Liberty Lass dons her gear for one last mission...

Act 2 - Travel to Doctor Voltus' old castle; a battle with Captain Reicher and minions. (Modern hero team with Liberty Lass).

Cut Scene 2 - Set up a device that can 'trap' Doctor Voltus; create mechanical keys in play that must trigger to permanently trap him so he can face trial for war crimes.

Act 3 - Final battle with Doctor Voltus with some triggered events built into the battle.

Cut Scene 3 - Funeral for Bronze Beacon 2? Something to finalize the events. Maybe have an event where the wrist bands he carried are donated to the museum his neice works for... set up the future Bronze Beacon? Historical comment about how this event was later ret-conned to include BB 3 even though that was never 

Hmm. I solved a lot of this as I was blogging. I know that I spoke about this at some point, but writing is really a thinking process as much as it can be a process of revelation; I talked to my students earlier this year about how I don't use writing to put down the things I already have in my head. Sometimes, I sit down with only the vaguest idea, but the PROCESS of writing it down and getting it out in front of my eyeballs allows me to see how the dots connect. That is exactly what happened here. What I ended up writing down is a lot more than was in my head, and much better organized, than when I started. Writing process for the win!