Tag: dungeons & dragons (Page 1 of 4)

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.

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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!

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Treasures Just Beyond – O5R GM Hack

Powered by the OGL, inspired by the OSR

Ever run a 5th Edition game and wonder where an important GM-facing rule is? Ever design a dungeon-crawl and grimace when all the PCs can see in the dark unaided? What are torches for in this edition, anyway?

Throw out your game master guide* and use this instead! Treasures Just Beyond – O5R GM Hack is here for you!

Treasures Just Beyond – O5R GM Hack is a super handy, 28-page reference guide and crawling-rules compilation formatted to be printed out as an A5 booklet: just open it in Adobe Acrobat, select Booklet, print, and staple! (You’ll want a long arm stapler: buy, barter for, or steal** one today!)

It compiles the best, fastest route to getting PCs playing in that “old-school” style where light, inventory, and careful exploration matters. On the GM’s side, it’s got all the hazards, trap rules, and object interaction mechanics you’ll ever need. Plus, it features robust social interaction and exploration rules, as well as some new twists on monster rules, all packed into a super-useful, reference-friendly layout.

In these pages, you’ll get killer new “house” rules and references like these:

  • Full dungeon-crawl, hex-crawl, and even settlement-crawling rules utilizing Event Dice.
  • Extremely-simple-yet-robust social rules using old-school reaction rolls.
  • PC defense rolls: Players better pay attention even if it’s not their turn!
  • Old-school morale rules, as well as simple rules and guidelines for boss monsters and minions.
  • Updated procedures dungeon, wilderness, and settlement “turns” that fit on a single page!

With Treasures Just Beyond – O5R GM Hack, everything you need to give your 5th Edition games that old-school feel, and run it smoothly, is right at your fingertips!

*Don’t throw it out! It’s got all the cool magic items in it, and vaguely okay downtime rules!

**Don’t steal stuff!

Cover image by Dean Spencer. All Rights Reserved.

Pay What You Want on itch.io and DrivethruRPG!

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!

Enter The Nerdom Plays D&D: Treasures Just Beyond Character Sheets

The continuing adventures of the Enter The Nerdom crew should be posted to your favorite podcast listening service soon! In celebration, here are some character sheets I created for these sessions.

These character sheets are perfect for Knave and most of its hacks, and can probably do in a pinch for any ability score-based D&D retroclone or remix. The particular hack we are using is my current playtest draft of a Knave hack I call Treasures Just Beyond. It adds very basic dungeon and wilderness procedures, provides a slightly more robust social mechanic based on reaction rolls and attitude, and modifies the magic system to mix in elements of the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons and GLOG (perhaps better explained and shown in the Cairn SRD “GLOG Magic Hack“). Don’t worry, I’ll be posting that entire playtest document very soon!

Without further ado, here are the character sheets for Treasures Just Beyond (Enter The Nerdom Variant):

Player Character sheet

NPC Hireling sheet

Editable version of both via Google Slides. You’ll need to click File > Make a Copy and save it to your Drive somewhere, then you can edit it.

Enjoy!

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