Candid thoughts on pixels, polyhedrons, and paper.
Greetings fellow readers, today I’m here to tell you about that very cryptic something that’s been taking up a majority of my free time lately. For once I’ve been absent from blogging for reasons other than my dayjob, life in general, or pure procrastination and I’m really excited to tell you a bit more about it.
I’ve been working with Sersa V from Save Versus Death and a handful of other very talented individuals on a project of somewhat epic proportions, a little something we’re calling Saturday Night Delves.
Saturday Night Devles (SND) are a series of one shot adventures for 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons set within the fourthcore vein, our aim is to recapture the fun and excitement of dungeon crawls of yore. Aimed at actually being able to pick one up and run it on any given night where you and your group have a few free hours, SND’s also come with all the materials you need to run the game along with optional tournament rules for competitive play and scoring.
SND adventures are challenging, innovative, deadly, evocative and most importantly – a ton of fun to play. Saturday Night Delves are not for the faint of heart, they will test both player and character skill as well as the DM’s. If you’re not familiar with what fourthcore is, I can give it to you in a nutshell; it’s a high risk – high reward, over the top challenging and often bleak playscape where ‘step and die’ rings as loud and clear as death bells themselves.
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.
I’m not sure why, but sometimes I’ve had players who downright just play like wimps. It is a stereotype (or perhaps assumption) that spans far and wide regarding player characters in RPG’s that label them as heroes or extraordinary in some way. You would think these people who weave elemental and divine powers from their fingertips, transform into beasts, leap chasms and wear plate armor brimming with weapons would charge headfirst into danger.
Apparently not always, as my most recent homebrew campaign first started I’d never seen so many players take the “safe route” so often. By safe route I don’t mean “Let’s see if we can convince the baron of X before we try Y” I mean when encountered with a graveyard that may have a few zombies lurking around they opted to sleep until daylight before investigating, even though an urgent matter was at hand. Unfortunately I didn’t punish properly for taking a casual approach to dispatching evil.
I had a cinematic encounter laid out before them, the moon was full and the graveyard thick with mist where an ominous winged silhouette appeared each night perched atop an abandoned tower. A barmaid offers them a key left by a stranger who said it would unlock the towers mysteries also offering gold to vanquish whatever sinister thing that resides in the tower. “You say the shadow appears there every night, and it’s yet to attack?” “Well then it’s probably not going to do anything tonight either, let’s get some rest and investigate when the sun rises, it will be safer this way.”
