171 – re:play Essentials Kit 3

July 30, 2019July 30, 2019 / gg no re / Leave a comment

D&D 5e Essentials Kit continued.

Here are the character sheets of everyone but John:

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170 – Dear Gary 1

July 23, 2019July 22, 2019 / gg no re / Leave a comment

We start our very serious and important rpg advice column. Write in with questions of your own for next time.

Note: We know the mics are hot. Will fix that for next time.

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Dear Gary

169 – re:play Essentials Kit 2

July 17, 2019July 17, 2019 / gg no re / Leave a comment

The Essentials Kit continues.

Here are the character sheets of everyone but John:

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168 – Insanity Elevation Contour Mapping

July 9, 2019July 8, 2019 / gg no re / Leave a comment

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.

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youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFNIRjq48x60-bTW-bY0dQA
soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/ggnorecast
podcast: gg no re @ itunes
twitter: https://twitter.com/ggnorecast
anchor: https://anchor.fm/ggnore

167 – re:play Essentials Kit 1

July 2, 2019July 1, 2019 / gg no re / Leave a comment

We start our actual play of the new 5e Essentials Kit.

Here are the character sheets of everyone but John:

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166 – Essentials Kit Hype

June 25, 2019July 8, 2019 / gg no re / Leave a comment

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.

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165 – Inferno 2

June 11, 2019June 10, 2019 / gg no re / Leave a comment

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 all the public domain image assets (mostly from Gustave Doré) Daniel used to do this in Roll20: https://imgur.com/a/uenONOl.

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.

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164 – re:play Dungeon Academy 10

June 4, 2019June 3, 2019 / gg no re / Leave a comment

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.

Dramatis Personae

The PCs

Saggitarius (Tim)

Nike (John)

Luna (Jim)

The NPCs

Patroclus (Drak Spears 1-B)

Nero (Naut Spears 3-A)

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163 – D&D 5e Races Tier List

May 28, 2019May 27, 2019 / gg no re / Leave a comment

We rate the 5e races. Make sure to check our youtube for an actual video of the process.

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162 – re:play Kirland 1

May 21, 2019May 20, 2019 / gg no re / Leave a comment

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
Handout of loot goals and bonds for players: LINK
5e Monster Cards (I printed 4 to a sheet and quartered each page): LINK (aff)
Music generator used to create the campaign theme: https://www.aiva.ai/
Chartopia Collection of my selected random tables: LINK
Chartopia Collection I made of the Moldvay Basic treasure types; I preferred to use this when manually rolling up treasure for lairs: LINK
Pastebin of raw GM notes, from which all the documents were created: LINK
Web app to create world map: https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/
- 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
- It’s integrated with this city generator: http://fantasycities.watabou.ru
Main dungeon generator: http://www.dizzydragon.net/adventuregenerator/gen
Web app to generate lairs: http://meta-studios.com/dg/dungen.html
Web app to generate hirelings: http://meta-studios.com/dg/hire.html
Dyson’s free to use maps: https://dysonlogos.blog/maps/commercial-maps/
DnDBeyond for rules reference: https://www.dndbeyond.com/

How to Print the Booklets

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:

Print all the maps
Print the booklets appropriately (see above)
Pull up my Chartopia Collection for the campaign on your phone
Check the links section above just in case

You’ll have to improvise some things, but it’s certainly enough for Daniel to get several sessions out of, even without cleanup and revision.

How Daniel Made the Booklets

Once you get a hang of it, it’s not difficult to paste your notes into booklet form.

Used Word
SHIFT + CTRL + 8(*) to turn on formatting visbility (e.g., page breaks)
CTRL + ENTER to force a page break
Pages in multiples of 4
Reserve page 1 & 2 for cover and inside front cover, next-to-last & last for inside back cover and back cover.

Daniel tried doing it in Google Docs for max portability, but it seems to lack some of the essential ease of use features that Word has.

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patreon: https://patreon.com/ggnore
podcast: gg no re @ itunes
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anchor: https://anchor.fm/ggnore