Conan the Barbarian: Rogues in the House

Mild spoilers follow for the story…

This short story by Robert E. Howard was really quite delightful to read. I saw so many aspects that have become tropes of tabletop roleplaying along with sword & sorcery stories. Particularly the traps in the house. The enlistment of the villain as part of the group against a monster with which they are trapped. 

The entire arc includes political intrigue, the enlistment of Conan as a champion for one. Explorations, battle with a monstrous adversary, and the betrayal and eventual death of a villain. It’s quite a fun story, and showcases Howard’s descriptive skills. I’d recommend it to anyone wanting insight into one of the many stories that likely directly influenced the spread of the TTRPG hobby.

En5ider Reactions Issue 15

Party of One: Rewards of the One-on-One Campaign is by Matt Click. This article doesn’t provide any new mechanics or assistance for running one-one-campaigns, instead dedicating its word count to attempting to persuade the reader of the virtues of this type of play.

The article isn’t bad, but doesn’t really grab me the same way that others which offer more concrete tools for this type of play do. For instance, Arcadia Issue 22 provides Heroic Champions: Powerful New Classes for Parties of One by Bill Doyle, a bold and creative idea to actually allow a game master to use a normal amount of monsters with a fun challenge level for encounters in a one-on-one game. I’ll write more on this particular idea, which I tried out in my session on Hurkaz the Mighty.

Although this article disappoints, it did remind me of my preferred one above. It would certainly be fun to run some published adventures that it’s more difficult to get a group together for due to time constraints as a one-on-one.

En5ider Reactions Issues 12-14

Issue 12 of En5ider is titled Fantastic Times & Librams, by Russ Morrissey. A d100 list of titles of books, with authors, physical description and an optional rarity, price, and page count. I really love this article because I love books and it provides an easy way to include mundane books in adventures as loot or flavor. Not much else to the article than this, but the books are creative.

Image is property of ENWorld Publishing

Fire of the Mind, in Issue 13, is by James Abendroth. 

I am including a content warning for discussions of trauma and mental disorders for this discussion of the article.

This article discusses real world mental disorders and their potential applications for a 5e game. The discussion is generally understanding and treats those who suffer from these disorders in the real world with respect. However, I personally don't see a great need to gamify elements of mental disorders. The proposed player options mostly focus on roleplaying (like most mental effects in 5e). There are some mechanical suggestions for penalties or impacted skills, which could be used if you are playing with the optional sanity mechanics for 5e. However, I largely don't see a need to have player characters use this type of material in the 5e system. The GM advise is slightly more helpful in providing options of how to incorporate some of the behaviors descripted into their adventures through NPCs. Some care is needed to make sure to be sensitive in the course of gameplay though. Overall, it doesn’t break much new ground and it’s not likely that I’ll personally use this particular article.

Issue 14 is Strands of Life, by Giltônio Santos is an interesting article. It reminds me of the style and tone of articles I've seen in old issues of Dragon Magazine. The article includes a brief discussion of different classes capable of healing in 5e. Then various strategies of healing or preserving allies hit points are outlined. These are quite interesting. This includes a brief discussion of damage mitigation spells, direct healing, and noting that gradual healing spells are lacking in 5e compared to previous editions. Then it proceeds to address this and the gaps in healing capabilities in 5e. These spells aren't all worth including in your game, but I might test a few out with the Life Cleric in my current Ptolus campaign.

En5ider Reactions Issues 9-11

In issue 9, Circles of Power, by Mark Kernow, provides three druid subclasses. The first is the Circle of the Birds and Beasts. This class is similar in theme to the circle of the shepherd, but focuses on controlling animals in it's powers. They are very utility focused, but not necessarily combat effective. Not my favorite subclass, and reflective of some very early and quirky 5e design.

The next subclass, the Circle of the Elements, reminds me of a bender from Avatar the Last Airbender. Again, kind of odd design. The final class, the Circle of Life, has similar oddities, including a change to spellslot recovery that references the wizard's arcane recovery feature. Referencing another class or ability generally strikes me as bad design because it requires consulting another source rather than making the subclass ability standalone.  Overall, not my top article from En5ider.

Issue 10, by Carl Heyl, focuses on creating puzzles for your game that are actually fun. This brings up an issue I've often had with puzzles—challenging the players, instead of their characters, can be frustrating for them rather than a fun game experience. Additionally, there’s an inherent danger in putting anything important behind a puzzle because your players may not figure it out. While interesting, this article still didn’t quite crack the nut for me on this subject.

Issue 11, Winterheart, is a brief adventure by Esper. Spoilers from here out. And content warnings for self-harm, familial death, racism, and sexual assault. I'd recommend you just pass on this adventure if these concern you.

It contains some problematic tropes that diminished my interest at the beginning. It begins as a bit of a Romeo and Juliet story, but rapidly we find that Juliet (named Katina in this case) dies with her father while fleeing her lover's family. Her younger sister is captured and given to the Romeo character (named Aldric Sangellion) as a "war trophy" by his father. The objectification of this character (her name is Chryssa) bothers me. If I were to run this adventure, I'd treat her as a prisoner, rather than using the language of implied enslavement and elements of potential sexual assault currently conveyed. There is certainly enough material to turn Chryssa into a non-helpless captive too, as the core tension of the story (there are a few too many plot threads) seems to be that if she remains captured, the trauma of losing her family will drive her to commit suicide and unleash her nascent winter magic to create an eternal winter (a la super dark version of Frozen, and thus the title of the adventure). As is, Chryssa's depiction follows the trope of the young maid in the tower (and the room she is in is noted to be Aldric's bedchambers--which further reinforces the negative and potential sexual violence mentioned above). There's also some elements of motivation for the two families, driving their conflict, which involves a magic tree, and the racial tension from one faction being humans and the other elves.

You might be able to rectify some of the problematic elements by removing the more problematic language used to describe Chryssa's capture and imprisonment. The old tropes and other problematic themes could also be broken up by gender swapping characters, and not grounding the conflict in a racial difference. 

The dark, tragedy elements of the story are compelling to me, and I think provide reason not to toss out the whole thing. There's also a lovely little regional map that I think is a good tool to facilitate an adventure. But as I mentioned above, I certainly understand completely passing on this adventure. It's interesting to see how much EN Publishing has adjusted its content (similar to others like Kobold Press) to reflect a more inclusive view of the hobby. It's just unfortunate that it's really only been the past four or five years. I imagine there may be other adventures with these themes in the next several dozen issues.

Lore Book: Battle of the Field of Blood

This lore book was written for my ongoing Ptolus game, but also establishes some of the lore regarding the mortal understanding of fiends in my own setting.

This battered, black leather book relates both a series of lists of commanders and troops in a battle said to have been waged “upon the fields of blood in the circle of envy.” The unnamed author’s descriptions decline in clarity until the latter pages which descent into utter gibberish—perhaps the last ravings of a broken mind.

The initial entries praise the “lords of the entropic hosts,” lauding the “great vision and glory” of their commander, the “cambion son of the great ascended Gnasher of Endless Bones,” a balor said to have slain “a thousand devas of the ill-begotten chorus of wailers.” 

The account of the battle lists “a hundred war chiefs of a thousand legions of the blessed hosts of chaos” arrayed against “the ill favored armies of the infernal pit.” The fallen angel, Dalferion, is noted as the head of this force, with the hell knights “Flegthas, Naras, and the dread knight Karcius” as her lieutenants at the head of these “endless, ant like hordes.”

Lore Book: The Ebon Binding

The following lore book was written for the players in my ongoing Ptolus campaign to provide some in-game lore to the players on the cult of the Ebon Hand, one of the chaos cults operating in Ptolus. 

This large tome of battered leather, with metal reinforced corners and spine seems to contain the book of scripture of the “Ebon Prince.” It speaks of an ancient ritual undertaken to “bring the Ebon one into the world that the darkness might blot out the light” and that the “holy tenebrous city might be exalted once more with tithes of blood and skulls.”

The hand of the Ebon Prince is said to have been cut off when the portal to the “realm beyond understanding” was shut by “the Iron Spike.” The only further mention of this person or entity is a reference to them being placed upon a black spike on the walls of the “desolate city thrown down in lasting shame.”

Scrawling in the last few blank pages of the book includes the words “Crimson Coil” and “Tolling Bell.” The rest is indecipherable.

Kickstarter Spotlight: Beyond the Woods

I don’t often showcase products in development or crowdfunding, but Beyond the Woods strikes me as a product worth highlighting via my abet limited reach. I want to note that I don’t know the creators, and they aren’t providing me any compensation.

This project just started its crowdfunding campaign two days ago and has already reached and exceeded its goal. This article from Polygon provides a great overview of the project, along with some interview questions with the principal creator behind the project, Emmet Byrne. This also bodes well for the project, as Byrne was a lead designer on multiple highly successful products from Cubicle7–including Broken Weave, a 5e setting I absolutely adore (I am in process of writing perhaps the most in depth review of that product on the internet, so stay tuned for it to drop once I have time to finish it!)

Inspired by Irish myth and legend, Beyond the Woods certainly looks interesting, and beautiful based on the artwork already shared. You can take a look at all of this with their free QuickStart product, which provides an overview of new mechanics and an adventure for you to try out yourself.

But what really intrigues me about this product? Sorry to bury the lead—is the codified and robust hexcrawling system Beyond the Woods provides, along with unique inventory management and resource mechanics. There’s plenty of good hex crawl resources, like those from Justin Alexander. But this strikes me as an extremely polished, 5e-tailored system. This system is setting agnostic, allowing it to be ported to any setting or campaign. I think it would be a wonderful addition for Tomb of Annihilation, or other campaigns using hex crawls without a robust or detailed accompanying system. Along with pointcrawls facilitated by Cubicle7’s excellent Uncharted Journeys, this provides a great framework for my sandbox campaigns and adventures in the future. I think you could seamlessly use this alongside the aforementioned title to have long distance pointcrawls and also have hexcrawls in frontier and exploration areas. 

I’m also taking the time to highlight this project because it is a small publisher—I think this is an outstanding project, but I worry about the book being available for interested GMs in the future. So I hope their crowdfunding success continues so they are able to print a large run of copies and be successful in sharing their content and getting it onto our shelves, into our PDF libraries, and most importantly: playing at our game tables!