A couple weeks ago a history professor on X "influenced" me into picking up Manor Lords, and I've been able to steal away and play a few (6) hours. What he said in his review is true, and originally I was going to tweet my review, and say that on the whole I liked it, but as I began writing, more came out. I realized I did not, in fact, like it, and now there's blog post.

I would even go so far as to say, skip Manor Lords and pick up Foundation instead if you're looking for a medieval city builder.

Due to fanboying on Twitter about Sousou no Frieren, and proclaiming it to be quite possibly the best anime I've ever seen, I was asked if I'd ever watched Record of Lodoss War. I had not. So I remedied that. Since it's directly based on a "replay" of a Dungeons and Dragons game from 1986 it was incredibly inspirational (and beautifully animated). I came away feeling that Frieren is better, but it was marvelous regardless.

Here are my 25 takes on Record of Lodoss War for Dungeon Masters and game/adventure designers.

 

(Spoilers below)

I'm all caught up on HBO's Scavenger's Reign. My initial take, after watching the first two episodes, was lackluster.

It's clearly inspired by Mœbius, which isn't bad, but it felt somehow derivative, instead of "inspired by". On twitter I called it "a tour with no stakes". I've now caught up, (I believe the final three episodes drop tonight), and I think I can better articulate my thoughts on the show.

I don't like the characters. Particularly Sam and Ursula (seen above), but I want to run through them.

The Tuesday night campaign I play in is rapidly coming to its conclusion. It's been such an interesting thing, in large part because it's basically two distinct sections of content.

The low level content was much more open and sandboxy (very anchored to the official 5e way of pseudo sandboxes, but at least it was trying). Then I believe, it tried to go "epic" for the higher level stuff. However it feels like the writers spent all their time on the early game, and then just tossed off the later game. And it's unfortunate.

 

 

I fell behind for several days because Sean McCoy sold me on Dragon's Quest XI (which is fucking amazing, more on it later I think), and this past weekend I was at a small local board gaming convention where I wrote the rest of the dungeon in my downtime.

Finishing a bit early works out because I need to talk about the hallways of this dungeon, maybe figure out an encounter table, detail room 19's effects, and (more importantly) catalogue the things referenced in this dungeon level as a whole. I started in the Abyss to ostensibly make it easier when I did the upper levels of the mega dungeon in the real world. The things down here should have echoes and references up above. We'll see how that actually pans out. In the meantime, here's the rest of (one of) Graz'zt's Ivory Towers in the Abyss.

Untitled by Maria Rubinke

Bryce Lynch over at 10 Foot Pole reviewed The Sepulchre of the Serpent’s Servant yesterday and it's gotten me blogging.

 

We're still in the Abyss.

I need to do a proper overview post I guess, but my plan for Dungeon23 broadly is to write a room a day, and make a weekly blog post recap of things. Here goes.

 

I have been playing 5e with some friends for several years now. When Covid hit we moved online and have been using VTTs to play, with a few in person sessions here and there. It's worked out nicely because one of our group members is remote from the rest of us (yay technology). DMs and campaigns have rotated, and here at the end of 2022, we wanted to have an in person game. The current campaign had reached a transition point so the idea was floated of doing a one-shot.

 

I continue to maintain a sort of obsession regarding "content locks", and a thread on reddit got me writing.

 

A few days ago I had a tweet go "viral". Well, I mean, I got triple digit likes, and there was a decent amount of discussion and retweets.

 

Dabus from Planescape

I had a bit of a self realization, or maybe mental crystallization of what had previously been vague thoughts the other day on Discord.

I think languages, light and locks are all effectively the same thing from a TTRPG perspective. Or at least, they all serve the same role in the game (to use a potentially fraught word): they gatekeep players from content.

This post by Daztur from the enworld forums is now over 10 years old and it's still one of my mental touchstones. I'm going to repost it in part here because the only stories that last are the ones that are retold, and this one deserves to be retold far, wide, and frequently.

On the topic of WotC developing the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons and changing things up from 4th edition.