Candid thoughts on pixels, polyhedrons, and paper.
Recently I received an email from a reader who’d read over my CheapassDM segment on condition markers and decided to let me know about a solution he makes for similarly comparable price. He was kind enough to send me out a set for review and I’ve put em’ to the test for you!
The markers are aimed at being an Alea Tools alternative and do a pretty good job of it too. They are made from a soft, bendable foam like you would find at a hobby store and are about 1/10th of an inch thick, perhaps a little less as I didn’t actually measure. You get a buttload of colors and 110 markers in total for the 8$ he charges which seems like a steal, but are they worth it?
Let me start by saying up front that rpgKids is probably the best 3$ you can spend in beginning to foster the love of RPG’s in a child. Mr. Enrique Bertran (aka @NewbieDM) sent a call out to fellow gamer dads on twitter a few weeks ago, so I felt complied to answer him. After speaking to him I was given the honor to play test some of this delightful project before it came to the masses. I had been familiar with his rpgKids system only vaguely before this, having glanced over it a time or two. When it came to “playing D&D” with my son before it had always been some malformed abbreviated form of 4th edition I hacked up on the spot, no consistency. Thankfully with rpgKids that’s now a thing of the past and he has a simple yet understandable system to play with rules anyone can pick up within minutes.
This evolution of the system (1.5) is somewhat of a re-vamping of his rpgKids system he’d release a year or so ago. He’s made additions, changes, and clarifications as well as extra optional rules for magical items and bonuses/penalties during combat only to name a few. Also added in are special non-combat abilities for each of the 4 class archetypes which are the Sword Fighter, Healer, Archer and Wizard. The system is so simple and so easy to pick up I believe it could be used as a gateway not only for kids but even those non-gamer adults we all have in our lives.
The rpgKids rulebook is 24 pages, comes with everything you need to begin playing immediately and also provides printable grids for creating your own maps and tokens for heroes and monsters. Therein he’s also included a full blown adventure entitled “The Lair of the Frog Wizard” which is a sizable little adventure complete with flavor text and ready to print maps of the locales within the story.
Hammerfast isn’t your everyday adventure module, in fact it’s not really an adventure at all if you wanna’ get technical. Think of Hammerfast not as a blank canvas for your campaign world, but one that’s been penciled in lightly for you to alter as much as you want. It’s a great backdrop for setting up an entire campaign or at least a major city. The contents state it is optimized for taking players ideally through levels 1-10, however I think a little ingenuity could push it a bit further than that.
Without giving away the back story from the book verbatim I’ll just say that the city itself has a lot of history, to say the least. Ghosts walk the streets alongside the living and no one thinks anything of it, some of them even hold places in society – acting as teachers instructing those in a craft they excelled in during life like blacksmithing perhaps. There are some tensions between those devoted to Moradin and Gruumsh who basically hold dominion over the cities and it’s ghostly inhabitants. There is a lot of room for tension and treachery in a city like this, which is great for your campaign world and creating player intrigue.
