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Enter The Nerdom Plays Dungeons & Dragons…by Way of Ben Milton’s Knave

I recently joined the Enter The Nerdom podcast to discuss Dungeons & Dragons, the movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and all things tabletop roleplaying games (listen to the episode here or at your favorite podcast service).

This week, I’m back on, running them through an “old-school” style dungeon crawl using two fantastic resources:

  • Ben Milton’s Knave
  • Directsun Games’ Puzzle Dungeon: The Seers Sanctum

Hosts Chad Cook, Stan Moroncini, and Watson Bradshaw are joined by Dan Mason, with yours truly as the Dungeon Master! Here’s a little teaser about the session.

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Discussing Dungeons & Dragons and RPGs with Enter The Nerdom Podcast

Quick update, and hopefully the first of many new ones to come!

On May 17th I had the amazing opportunity to join Chad Cook, Stan Moroncini, and Watson Bradshaw on the Enter The Nerdom podcast to discuss all things Dungeons & Dragons, and even a bit about the broader tabletop roleplaying game industry. We discussed Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, the different editions of D&D from both a mechanics and historical perspective, White Wolf and their World of Darkness games, and much more!

Click to check out Enter The Nerdom Episode 12 – Rolling for Initiative or listen at all of your favorite podcast services!

Make sure to subscribe and rate to hear more about various facets of nerd cultural from this crew and their amazing guests, including subjects as far ranging as how to join the Star Wars-themed 501st Legion charity group, recent wrestling events, anime fandom, and much, much more!

Actual Play Incoming!

Stay tuned to Enter The Nerdom, because this week we’ll be doing a Dungeons & Dragons actual play! We’ll be joined Dan Mason, their go-to-guy for wrestling, anime, and more, as well as our fearless leader in a comic book discussion group known as the Reading Rainbros!

Using Simple DND to Create a Knave-based Funnel Character Sheet

A friend of mine reached out about doing a one-shot “training scenario” style introduction to Dungeons & Dragons for a small group, and I hit on the idea of using Portal Under the Stars, one of the most popular funnel-style adventures for Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. Ever the tinkerer – and looking to get my money and time’s worth from a bunch of Knave purchases and hacking – I decided I’d convert Portal to Knave, further simplifying the player-facing side of things. Don’t get me wrong, I love DCC RPG! But it’s got a few (albeit minor) barriers to entry that seemed worth removing for this exercise.

The conversion work has been a breeze – I could probably do it on the fly, but I suspect I’ll re-use this setup again and again – but I wanted to make certain I had a cool character sheet to go with it. There’s a ton of great hand-drawn ones out there, even by the likes of map-maker extraordinaire Dyson, but when I stumbled upon Simple DND, I knew I was just a 5-minute Photoshop job away from perfection.

So here you go: my Knave-based funnel-optimized character sheet, tweaked only slightly from Simple DND‘s Mini Character Sheet (usage license here). You can fit four characters on here, you’ve got 20 inventory slots, and I tailored it to include Ancestry and Occupation sections. This could easily serve as an NPC or monster tracking sheet in just about any version of D&D: just use the inventory slots as a notes section! Similarly, you could use it to track familiars, pets, or hirelings in everything from OD&D up through 5th Edition.

Funnel Character Sheet snip

Funnel Character Sheet – Click to Download

Let me know how you use it at your gaming table in the comments!

Another Simple Cortex Prime Hack – Minimum Dice, Maximum Fun

The Core of Cortex posits a really simple version of the Cortex Prime system, one that’s great for off-the-cuff sessions. It’s also simple enough for fairly young players to understand, which is an added benefit. Gaming with little kids is always a fun exercise in game design: how do you make it simple and fun, with enough “meat” to teach the little tikes some basic game play strategy?

I’ve been toying around with a simple game system spawned from a specific circumstance: I’ve got a single die of each size – d4, d6, d8, d10, and d12 (and also a d20; more on that later!) – for myself (the GM) and another set for my player(s), and that’s it. I think it may work really well and leans into some Cortex-isms that The Core of Cortex actually avoids: different die sizes, and effect dice.

You be the judge! Here’s what I’ve got:

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Spells for Labyrinth The Adventure Game

Picking up from last time, here’s a very simple magic system for the Labyrinth Adventure Game. It’s heavily inspired by Ben Milton’s Knave, which is fitting since he wrote the adventure portions of Labyrinth. Effectively, spells are simply one-use scrolls (or whatever form you want them to appear as; I picture them etched on little stone tablets) that allow for a very specific instantaneous or short-duration special effect.

Check ’em out!

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