2d6 Stingbats

Today we're looking at Sapphire Seas by Alfie & Charlie Lintzgy and published by Menagerie Press. In Sapphire Seas we will "Explore Phoenician-inspired isles, recover long-lost treasure, fight mythic battles, and sail the seas in this level 1-10 campaign."  "Campaign" is a loaded word in the TTRPG space. In the loosest terms, it just means the sum total of whatever happened across a series of play sessions. But as a product it has a very specific meaning and carries certain expectations. If you tell your table you're running a campaign, images of Curse of Strahd or Tomb of Annihilation will pop up - campaigns where the party has a clear goal pretty early on, and where there's a loose structure of events that leads to the eventual achievement of that goal. Sapphire Seas is not a campaign in that sense. The current latest comment on the Kickstarter pretty well sums it up: " Where is the 'First complete level 1-10 adventure for Shadowdark RPG...

Today we are looking at Soulblight - Swords and Sorceries , a collection of 7 adventures and 2 settlements by Laurin-David Weggen. Although it is ostensibly for his Soulblight setting, any of the adventures could easily be dropped into any other setting you desire. So what is a Sword and Sorcery story? Besides the swords and sorcery parts, it's usually an adventure that moves quickly, with a focus action rather than character development, dealing with an immediate threat or need rather than world-impacting events or long-term story arcs. This is not the story of a party of adventurers methodically exploring an ancient tomb, peeling back its mysteries and puzzling out its secrets. Nor is it the story of an ages-long conflict between the forces of good and evil. This is a story of heroes taking big, violent risks for gold and glory, where one danger propels into the next until it culminates in a grand, bloody finale. It is, in some ways, antithetical to the sort of procedure-based du...

Today we're looking at Delve by Robert  “Bob World Builder" Mason and the folks at Eventyr Games. It bills itself as "a complete guide to building and surviving deadly dungeons with 200+ pages of dungeon-building tools and plug-and-play dungeons – and more monsters , treasures , player options, and traps than you can shake a 10-foot pole at!" This is a 5e conversion. The publisher and designers make 5e products. But they changed the cover from color to grayscale so I'm sure they nailed it. I'm going to take a closer look at some of the 12 dungeons included, but I want to address one thing first: "Delve" is a misnomer, in that none of these dungeons is very deep. The room counts are between 5 and 16 and the vast majority have 10 or fewer. I'm going to quote Gus L. again: "To make exploration meaningful the act of moving through dungeon locations needs to create a sense of ‘risk’ - tension and anticipation. In a scene or encounter based ad...

  Today we're looking at Lair of the Forgotten Queen by Caleb Paulson.  The premise of this four-part adventure is that the PCs are looking for three keystones (found in each of the first three dungeons) needed to unlock the fourth dungeon, the titular Lair of the Forgotten Queen. In the first dungeon, Grotto of Gelid Flame, rooms and hazards feel somewhat disjointed. Quicksand sort of makes sense in an underground sea grotto, but fire spouts don't. There's a sense that the dungeons are randomly generated. This is not a bad thing per se, but it's sometimes difficult to take randomly generated results and mold them into a cohesive location. So you end up with a bunch of rooms that feel separate from the others. Sean McCoy (creator of Mothership) wrote an excellent blog post earlier this year called Writing Rooms in Pairs . You should go read it. Then go read the rest of the blog because it's extremely helpful in many different ways. Anyways, Mr. McCoy proposes to con...

  Today we're looking at the Kickstarter page for Battlezoo from Roll For Combat. Yeah, this one's a little different. Work's been rough and I'm traveling this week so I'm being lazy. Battlezoo is a collection of 3 books that includes a bunch of new monsters, some new player options and rules for harvesting monster parts. At least two of the books, "Strange and Unusual" and "Elemental Storm" appear to be converted from D&D 5e and Pathfinder 2e. ♬One of these things is not like the other♬ The Kickstarter page tells us "All three books are guaranteed to follow all existing Shadowdark rules and themes and have been designed by legendary third-party Shadowdark designer Michael Putlack!" We also get an endorsement from Kelsey Dionne herself: "Roll For Combat pulls out all the stops with their production values and has the design chops to back it up." Let's see how those statements hold up! I really don't care about new...