Daniel shows how to add elevation contour lines to a hex map, how to calculate sight lines in terms of hexes, how to navigate overland by means of such, and muses on why in the world one might desire to do so.
Erratum: show notes page for this one is ggnorecast.com/168, not /167, but you already know that because you’re here.
We talk about the upcoming Essentials Kit for D&D 5, the actual play of which will be our next episode. We also touch on how we created characters, both mechanically and dramatically, and discussed more broadly the issue of suiting PCs to settings, especially when you don’t know what kind of themes will be present in the setting or module.
Daniel got it into his head to run a Dante’s Inferno tactical D&D war/storygame. Unfortunately, Roll20 doesn’t let you export entire campaigns; so we’re dumping all the assets out there for you to use if you want—or at least for you to get an idea of the kind of assets that would be involved were you to want to do something similar.
Here’s the translation of the Inferno he used: Esolen (2003)(aff)
Here’s the sequence of scenes he used:
Here’s a GDoc of all the flavor text, plus monster stats. Most of it is composed of quotations from Inferno (Cantos I-III), with some transitional prose by a lesser author.
In the episode, Daniel talks about the process for creating such a campaign and how you might go about doing your own literary homage-campaign.
The party continues into a labyrinth of the kobold lair, has to navigate using verbal description only, and gets into a dicey fight. Later that night, back in the real world, Saggitarius witnesses something that will have serious implications in the future.\
Check our Patreon to hear the AFTER DARK episode, in which we discuss what happens and talk about what we’re going to be doing next.
Actual play proper of our experimental 5e intro campaign, Kirland. Refer to the previous episode for background on how it was created, and see the links below for all the material Daniel had generated to run the first session of it.
In this episode, the characters explore around the barrow-downs, find hidden treasure, learn a bit about the town, grab some rumors, and head out to the marshes to collect a bounty on a bandit king’s head.
Patrons will get this revised material; but, with a little thought, you can probably run a game tonight by printing out the alpha material and hanging loose.
Links
The booklets and maps I used (expect roughness, inconsistency): LINK
If you set units to 1.8 miles and set the grid settings to the smallest possible setting, you’ll get six mile hexes. I did this for printing off maps, but it KILLS performance and took more time than it was worth. I recommend adding in the six mile hex overlay in another tool, or just sticking to a ruler
You’re likely going to have to fiddle a lot. You definitely, under page setup, want to select “booklet print” so that it knows how to arrange the pages. Beyond that, and you’re best off googling your particular issue.
How to Run the Game from This Stuff
If you download everything in the Google Drive folder, you should be good to go if you:
Bit of a weird ep this time. Daniel had less than a week’s notice to run a game for some youngsters, half of whom hadn’t really played an RPG before.
Daniel decided to make this a challenge run: create a new campaign and new vanilla D&D 5e setting from scratch in just a few nights. The materials and tools he used to do that are all down in the Links section.
However, since we were recording offsite, we ran into some technical difficulties, resulting in only the first bit of the session’s being recorded (and its sounding like we’re in a cave). Daniel supplies the rest of the ep in commentary.
Daniel will likely run this campaign again, and, to that end, will revise the materials you’ll find linked below, replacing randomly generated results with bespoke items, replacing random internet images with hand drawn ones, etc.
Patrons will get this revised material; but, with a little thought, you can probably run a game tonight by printing out the alpha material and hanging loose.
Links
The booklets and maps I used (expect roughness, inconsistency): LINK
If you set units to 1.8 miles and set the grid settings to the smallest possible setting, you’ll get six mile hexes. I did this for printing off maps, but it KILLS performance and took more time than it was worth. I recommend adding in the six mile hex overlay in another tool, or just sticking to a ruler
You’re likely going to have to fiddle a lot. You definitely, under page setup, want to select “booklet print” so that it knows how to arrange the pages. Beyond that, and you’re best off googling your particular issue.
How to Run the Game from This Stuff
If you download everything in the Google Drive folder, you should be good to go if you:
Daniel finally gets to run Dogs in the Vineyard, adapted to a familiar D&D setting. It’s teenage pseudomormon gunslingers, but with St. Cuthbert instead of Mormonism.
Tim and John have rolled up 5e clerics, and Daniel explains the few changes necessary to make D. Vincent Baker’s game of hard ethical judgments with potentially explosive consequences work when adapted to **the world’s most popular roleplaying game**. In this episode, we get through both initiation conflicts; when we pick back up, the clerics will hit their first town.
Links
You can’t buy this game anymore. Apparently, Vincent considers the setting 🚨 t o o 🚑 p r o b l e m a t i c 🚨 (although you can still buy Poison’d and Kill Puppies for Satan 🤔🤔🤔, and we’d definitely recommend Poison’d).
(We could be wrong about the reason for its discontinuation; we could find relevant quotes but no still-functional original source.)
All the more reason to tune in next time to see more fully how DitV works when adapted to an in-print game. The game itself may be dead, but its spirit lives on.
After we play through the town, we’ll publish the town with Daniel’s conversion rules.
Daniel gives a preview of a patron-only 4-in-1 page dungeon that we’ll be releasing soon, describing its method for making traps beforehand or at runtime.
And, speaking of traps, there’s DM perfectionism. You want everything in your setting to be up to your standards; so you end up producing less than you need. This induces a nasty cycle. Daniel says how he’s broken it with the help of old school fundamentalism.
