Tales of Xadia: The Dragon Prince Roleplaying Game (TOX) is a hidden gem that deserves more attention. This tabletop game comes with a robust digital toolkit, similar to D&D Beyond, and it’s built on the Cortex system found in Cortex Prime Game Handbook. Despite being tied to a popular TV show, TOX offers a lot to players who aren’t fans. In fact, I believe it’s the perfect system for running Curse of Strahd (COS), even better than D&D itself. Let’s dive in and see why.
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Page 1 of 5)
Tim Bannock writes lots of house rules, advice articles, and gathers useful links from all over the web to help you improve your Dungeons & Dragons gaming sessions!
One of the things I realized a long time ago, but Sly Flourish article “How to Survive a Digital D&D Future” really cements, is that Wizards of the Coast will never release the Dungeon Master’s Guide (DMG) that DMs need. No, I’m not talking about one that will “teach them how to DM,” which the current one does, and which the next one is arguably going to do better. Teaching how to DM is great, but you also need to provide tools for a DM to identify and create good content for their game. People crave exciting games, filled with fun content.
I’m talking about having a DMG that’s packed with the tools necessary to generate a campaign and a dungeon top to bottom in a format that goes beyond vague advice and stylistic choices. I’m talking about procedural dungeon and campaign creation. Procedural NPC creation. Procedural adventure and encounter table generation. One with tons of evocative ideas that show DMs how to turn that content into good, fun content for the players to engage with.
What I’m really talking about is all the nifty tools that Shadowdark just won multiple ENNIE Awards for doing. Let’s take look.
Turn Any Adventure Into the Best One-Shot to Run Easily
Beleaguered GMs everywhere suffer burn out, and even well established, well prepared GMs might have habits that make running a game difficult. Maybe it’s in choosing which adventure to run. Maybe you overprepare, juggling more information than the players will ever see, and you feel like you’re wasting valuable time. Maybe you just get caught up in the excitement of it all and dream of long campaigns, while in reality you’re lucky if enough players show up to the first session.
I’ve got a process that will help you out! Using cutting edge learning techniques, we’re going to tackle these problems. This process will give you the ability to design and develop a one-shot or mini-adventure quickly, and by using this method, you’ll have an easier time recalling all the information during the game session when you run it.
Try This Adventure Tracker for Dungeons & Dragons and Shadowdark In Your Game Sessions
Right before the pandemic, I purchased a slew of tools geared towards optimizing my Dungeons & Dragons game sessions. Among them were a whiteboard GM screen with clips, Inkwell Ideas’ 5E Creature Decks and Deck of Beasts, Pathfinder Pawns, and so much more. Then the pandemic torpedoed the use of most of those things, so I really leaned into going digital. This included taking a multi-day intensive course on organization over at Johnn Four’s Roleplaying Tips. That really expanded my Google Drive, Docs, and Sheets campaign management skills, and helped me reorganize almost every resource I use.
As I’ve gotten back into both in-person and online remote play more often in recent months, I realized I could leverage a much more robust — and still streamlined — way of managing each game session’s encounters. Hence my new Adventure Tracker, which has a lot of really handy features specific to any Dungeons & Dragons or Shadowdark, but applicable to any OSR or D&D-adjacent game. Read on to learn more!
Treasures Just Beyond – A Knave 1st Edition Hack with Gygaxian Flourishes
When the hosts of Enter The Nerdom approached me to run them through a game of “Old School style” Dungeons & Dragons, I knew I needed a lightweight ruleset to get us through what was likely to be a pretty fast one-shot scenario. It turned into two sessions, but we all agreed that the setup and “learning” time needed to be at a minimum to keep the podcast playthrough very fast and energetic. I turned to Ben Milton’s Knave to get what I needed!
I’d already worked on some hacks for Knave‘s 1st edition, so I just compiled those into a doc, stripped out some of Knave‘s more “lowlife, dirty bastards” stylings and replaced those with classic Gygaxian and Arnesonian flourishes: non-human PC ancestries, quick-playing dungeon and wilderness crawling rules, and a simple modification to make spellcasters a bit more of a thing via spellbook rules layered on top of the “anyone can use a scroll” magic rules. I topped it off with some Feat-like abilities to replace class abilities, and give the players their own little niche protection.
Here’s the final document I used, as a PDF formatted to be printed “Booklet” style in Adobe Acrobat, and stapled together. I used cardstock for the first page, to give it a sort of “cover” quality, and referenced it during play. Especially when the PCs started dropping to 0 hit points, or scoring critical hits and fumbles. (There were a lot more fumbles than hits, as I recall!)
Keep an eye on Enter The Nerdom to listen to our actual play of Directsun Games’ Puzzle Dungeon: The Seer’s Sanctum using these rules!