Monty Haul Zero Issue now available!

For those of you were on the fence about whether or not to back my recent Kickstarter campaign, you can now take a look at what I was driving at: Monty Haul #0 is now digitally available.

Monty Haul #0 is a Proof-of-Concept issue, full of assorted optional rules, backgrounds for characters, and more! Featuring a new take on familiars, two new cleric domains, a simple and not-so-deadly critical hit system, the Divine Archeologist archetype for rogues, and several new backgrounds including an expanded trio of options for the noble: dilettante, disgraced noble, and knight errant! Also included is a Noble Family House generator to quickly design interesting families to plague your nobles.

It's a cornucopia of usable options, written in a light and conversational style and grounded in the gaming days of yore. If by "yore" we're talking about the early 1980's. Monty Haul is suitable for discerning DMs and players of the fifth edition of the world's most popular fantasy rpg.

You can get it here, on DriveThruRPG's website.

Running a Kickstarter is Hard Work

I now know what a helicopter parent feels like. I've been hovering over my computer, hitting the refresh wheel so much it's now just perpetually spinning like the top from Inception.

But there's a reason for the hovering: people expect updates, and things move pretty fast. It's not really scary, but it's certainly daunting. Oh, and there are questions to answer, as well. But it's all for a good cause, because...Monty Haul is a go!

Kickstarter is Live!

And despite a rookie mistake at the beginning (which not a lot of people saw since it was the middle of the night), we have pledges, too! If you'd like in on the action, you've got two weeks, starting today: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/markfinn/monty-haul-fifth-edition-zine-with-an-old-school-vibe

The Kickstarter is Nigh!

I love using "nigh" in a sentence, don't you?

Hey, just in case you missed the first notification, here's another one for you: the Kickstarter for Monty Haul, an old-fashioned RPG 'zine for 5e, starts on Wednesday, but YOU can get notified when it drops so as to not miss out. All you gotta do is follow the link below and throw your email into the gaping maw of the Kickstarter beast.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/markfinn/monty-haul-fifth-edition-zine-with-an-old-school-vibe

I will post major updates here, but if you want to stay tied into what's up with the KS, please back the project (even if it's just for a buck) and you can follow along with the updates I will be (hopefully) posting regularly in the next couple of weeks.

Thanks, oh my gentle readers. I'll see you on the other side.

Introducing my 'Zine Quest 2 Project: Monty Haul!

Last year, Kickstarter surprised everyone with a cool little event called Zine Quest, a celebration of the early days of Role-Playing Games and the 'zines that jump-started (and for a while, sustained) the hobby.

Their intention was simple: don't think, just do. Make a 'zine, old school, with folding and stapling and drawing and paste-up and so forth. Take two weeks to raise money for it. Then print it and move on to the next issue, or whatever your jam is.

It was very cool, and it produced some really interesting projects. I'm not the only one who thought so, either. In a stunning move that surprised absolutely no one, they are doing it again. And this time, I'm doing a 'Zine of my own. Meet Monty.

Have Dice, Will Travel

So, this is a thing that happened; I just did my first gig as a professional DM.

This has been a long time coming. I've been teaching D&D to people for years--decades, really, and using D&D to promote language arts, stimulate communication skills, and encourage role-playing and creative problem solving. I have also taught the game to lots of people who want to swing swords, cast spells, and kill monsters. So, win-win.

The professional Dungeon Master sits at the intersection of today's Gig Economy and the rise in Geek Culture. A lot of people are intrigued by Dungeons & Dragons, and would like to play the game, but there is still something about the game, no matter how well-written the current rules are, that make it an activity that is better taught by someone who knows what they are doing instead of puzzled out for oneself. YouTube has helped, somewhat, but honestly, there's no better learning experience than roiling the dice for yourself.

I suppose now I'll need to formalize a price sheet, and maybe put it on this site, and very likely update that, as well. Can't have a blogspot address, after all. Doesn't send the right message. Or does it? I make a point of stating I've been doing this for a while. I wonder if I can still get an Earthlink account?

RPGaDay 2019: 23 Surprise

Oh, what the hell.  It's Friday.

I wasn't going to do this just yet, but hey...SURPRISE! It's an archetype from my own home-grown campaign setting for you to peruse and swipe if you like. My world has a lot of complicated old gods, and this particular thief archetype is an exploitation of that very fact. Click the link below to get it.

Thief Archetype: The Divine Archaeologist

This is a spell-casting thief, with an emphasis on utility spells, such as hiding, running, and transporting heavy objects. That's why the Divine Archaeologist also gets a second fourth level spell, and a fifth first level spell at Level 20, unlike the Arcane Trickster.

There is also an "Indiana Jones" component to the Divine Archaeologist; the clever fellow who has read up on the temples of the blood god and knows that every treasure room has a pressure plate right...there...or, maybe it was there...? I wanted the skills to reflect someone who learned a lot about ancient history, but little else. The notebook seemed like a good way to reflect that, with the added incentive of it being potentially stolen the night before a major temple raid.

My intention is to talk more about my campaign and the stuff I've done to 5th edition to accommodate my brilliant ideas and grandiose vision.

And Just for Grins, here's all of the other tidbits of homebrew and campaign stuff I've shared since the beginning of this 31 day challenge, in case you missed anything.

5e Background: Bureaucrat

5e Background: Exterminator

5e Background: Pilgrim

Familiars--Homebrew

Alternate Critical Hit System for 5e

Dilettante

Disgraced Noble

Knight Errant

Noble House Random Generator

RPGaDay 2019: 22 Lost

So, this is fun: Conan and Valeria encountering a dinosaur-like creature in the classic “Red Nails:”

Through the thicket was thrust a head of nightmare and lunacy. Grinning jaws bared rows of dripping yellow tusks; above the yawning mouth wrinkled a saurian-like snout. Huge eyes, like those of a python a thousand times magnified, stared unwinkingly at the petrified humans clinging to the rock above it. Blood smeared the scaly, flabby lips and dripped from the huge mouth. The head, bigger than that of a crocodile, was further extended on a long scaled neck on which stood up rows of serrated spikes, and after it, crushing down the briars and saplings, waddled the body of a titan, a gigantic, barrel-bellied torso on absurdly short legs. The whitish belly almost raked the ground, while the serrated backbone rose higher than Conan could have reached on tiptoe. A long spiked tail, like that of a gargantuan scorpion, trailed out behind. "Back up the crag, quick!" snapped Conan, thrusting the girl behind him. "I don't think he can climb, but he can stand on his hind legs and reach us—"

So, it’s basically a dinosaur, right? And if you can’t quite see it that way, Barry Windsor-Smith sure could. Here’s a page from his critically-acclaimed comic book adaptation of “Red Nails.”

click to enlarge

I told you that to tell you this: whenever I see the world “Lost” I assume that we’re going to be talking about dinosaurs. It’s inevitable and a little strange, but Lost, to me, is one half of the term “Lost World,” which means, in literary terms, Dinosaurs!

I love dinosaurs. If you don’t have a favorite dinosaur, you need to leave. I am serious. Dinosaurs are Monster Kid 101. They are a part and parcel of fantasy and science fiction both and stories of dinosaurs (from Lost Worlds) interacting with the humans that stumble across them are part of a sub-genre that is literally over a hundred years old.

Dungeons & Dragons understood this, and dutifully included stats for the most classic dinosaurs in the AD&D Monster Manual.  Here’s a very classic-looking T-Rex from Diesel for TSR’s Monster cards from 1982 (think flash cards for AD&D monsters with only slightly better color artwork than the black and white masterpieces in the Monster Manual).

TSR also published a classic module (by Zeb Cook and Tom Moldvay, no less), called The Isle of Dread, and it’s a classic Lost World wilderness hex crawl adventure on a strange island full of dinosaurs and other exotic creatures right out of Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle by way of Ray Harryhausen.

Dinos in D&D. Boom. Done. Everything should be platinum. I should be happy, right? Right? Well I can't get happy. It's physically impossible for me to get happy.

Maybe it’s my weirdly Puritanical streak when it comes to high and low fantasy. If we’re talking knights and wizards, I think dragons, not dinosaurs. After all, the game is called Dungeons and Dragons, not Dungeons & Dinosaurs. Why, then, does it not bother me when we insert Dinosaurs into modern-day settings (Jurassic Park) or the wild west (The Valley of Gwangi) or the Pulp era (King Kong).

Two reasons come to mind. One is that those other examples above all make use of a Lost World, whether by natural accident or man-made engineering. Lost Worlds have dinos, and that’s all the explanation you need. Also, in every other instance listed above, Dinosaurs were the apex predator, the aberration, the monster in a monsterless world. This is not true in Dungeons and Dragons; it creates an ecology where you have to figure out why the dinos haven’t eaten all of the monsters or vice-versa. After all, aside from the treasure hoarding, a red dragon and a Tyrannosaurus Rex have more or less the same diet, the same habitat, the same mannerisms, and certainly the same pants-shitting size and scale to terrify players.

The T-Rex can’t fly, cast magic, or breathe fire. You know, so it’s like a dragon, only...not as cool. And dinosaurs should never be not cool. Ever. 

Tim Truman's cover art for The Isle of Dread reprint.

But…stay with me now…what if there were no dragons? If instead of dragons, your big bad was the T-Rex, that becomes your default for the “oh, shit” moment when you realize the necromancer you’re supposed to fight has a pet therapod.

I’m thinking of a heroic fantasy world, where sorcery is more uncommon, and the humanoids are out in full force. The monsters of the world have managed to tame the dinosaurs in this world to act as beasts of burden and war mounts. It’s Dinotopia, only with Goblins and Drow. Dwarves charging into battle on Triceratops. Orcs riding allosauruses. The Lizard folk use Pteranodons as winged mounts. Monster armies are bad enough, but when the monster armies have conscripted dinosaurs, they become the stuff of nightmares.

Humans have none of those advantages, but maybe they are more adept at psionic abilities, and they use massive dino-killing siege equipment, as well as clockwork automatons scavenged from the wreckage of the last great war. High magic has disappeared in the wake of the rise of chaos. One of the campaign goals may be to find the source and re-awaken it to jump-start the Age of Wonder. It would mean the death of the dinosaurs and bring magic (and dragons) back into the world.

But before that happens, you have twenty levels of characters periodically running afoul of a pissed-off Stegosaurus and running like hell to escape the spiked tail swinging in a deadly arc, smashing trees apart as it does.


I would play in that game. Hell, I may have to write it.

Reviewing Strongholds & Followers

 I have been a little busy with real world stuff these past couple of months—the kind of things that are health-related—and so I have not been as active on the blog as I would like. Sorry about that. But I am still working, writing, and thinking about gaming and Dungeons & Dragons in particular. To that end, I will point you to Matt Colville’s YouTube channel, because he eats, sleeps, and breathes this stuff and I find myself in agreement with him, like, 98% of the time, when it comes to running D&D games. This is very likely because we are about the same age and have experienced many of the same things, and also we have very similar tastes regarding First Edition Stuff (such as Appendix N) and how we use it in gaming.

Colville is also very sincere and genuine in his discussions (really a monograph) of running and playing D&D. It shows, and it’s one of the things that makes him so likeable. It almost makes me forgive him for mispronouncing “archetype” every single time he says it.

Reviewing Art & Arcana

You have probably seen or heard about this massive tome on The Internets or maybe seen a review on The YouTubes. Art & Arcana is a ginormous, too-big-for-a-coffee-table Coffee Table book that's really a giant victory lap of sorts for the World's Most Popular Role-Playing Game. Not in a bad way.

This product was released in two versions; the one pictured on the left, a whatever Amazon is charging for it these days $50 investment that is equal parts revisionist history and art and marketing survey. For old-timers, there is a lot of "Oh, I remember that!" and "That's my favorite Module Art!" moments, along with company history that manages to be earnest in not quite dishing the dirt, but happily pointing out the quirks. It's big, it's heavy, it's hard to read. But for those of you who want something a little more upscale, read on, McDuff...

My Unasked-For Thoughts on 5e

Well, they certainly solved the question of
scale. That's a second-level cleric.
I kid! I kid the Player's Handbook.
It's really a third level cleric.

It’s obvious, I think, to everyone reading this blog that I’m currently playing and creating in the fifth iteration of Dungeons & Dragons, or 5e, as the kids call it these days. Part of this was an economic convenience in that it’s what’s out right now, and also one borne of necessity, i.e. that’s what all of the content is aimed at. But it doesn’t HAVE to go down that way, right? I mean, there are a metric shit-ton of Old School inspired systems out there, all using some version of the Basic/Expert edition of D&D or the first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Or, if I wanted something insanely commercial, there’s Pathfinder, which is D&D 3.5 re-skinned.  Oh, who am I kidding? There’s no way in HELL I would inflict Pathfinder on anyone. I’m not a monster.

But that brings up another factor: I have been running games for newcomers to tabletop role-playing games. Twelve new players in all, spread over several games and campaigns, each one of them familiar with the subject matter, but have never rolled funny-shaped dice before in their lives. Is the current version of D&D a good “first RPG” experience for newcomers?

Playing Games, Part 8: Just When I Thought I Was Out...

Nobody does Pacino from Godfather 3. They all do
Silvio doing Pacino from Godfather 3. 

Several years ago, I was employed by a homeschooling family as their creative arts teacher for one of their kids; a smart, funny, creative young man who was a little shy and needed help with his verbal and language skills. When he was younger, I was initially reading comics with him, which we both got a kick out of. Now that he was older now, he was into video games and Skyrim and all of that stuff. So, I thought, let’s kill a few birds with one stone and try Dungeons and Dragons first edition. He really took to it, and I re-discovered, I did, too.