My favorite DM advice

Hoo boy, if there’s one thing the internet is real good at, it’s telling DMs how to DM, and how to DM better. Does civilization really need yet another pile of DM advice?

Beats me. Fortunately I’m not responsible for civilization, only an infinitesimal slice, mostly myself. And this is a compilation of the advice, principles, and hacks that I’ve found most useful. I’ve written this in the first person, so it sounds a little less bossy or prescriptive, but almost all of this advice originated elsewhere (mostly from Zak Smith, Matt Colville, Ginny Di, and Mike Shea). If it doesn’t work for you, in whole or in part, that’s fine too. Everyone’s game is different, and this post is in part a list for me to review regularly, and a thought archive for my future self.

A lot of this is general, some of it is D&D specific — take what works for you and ignore the rest. If something strikes you as unwise or even wrong, or you have additional gems to share, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Some sweet art from Matt Colville’s Flee, Mortals! book of monsters.

RUNNING THE GAME IN THE MOMENT

Desperation in my players is good. Gross and disturbing stuff is good. Players who are scared or grossed out — players who are feeling something — are invested.

I don’t worry too much about detailed monster stat blocks or about running monsters “correctly”. What I need: AC, HP, damage, any special abilities; everything else is fungible. Bonuses to damage can be average or minimum PC level (e.g., vs level 5 PCs, monsters have +5 to hit and weapons do [die]+5 damage).

I use HP ranges for bosses — but if I go high, I reward the PCs accordingly for beating an extra-tough boss, with extra XP or loot or both. Don’t worry that anyone else at the table is tracking the monster’s hit points; trust me, they’re not. It’s hard enough for the DM to keep track of it, and the DM has to.

Opponents might negotiate, they might surrender, and they might run away. Not every fight has to be to the finish.

I try not to stress myself out with planning or second-guessing. I give the PCs some bad guys to fight or negotiate with, find a map of a place for them to meet up, and that’s an encounter. Don’t forget to build in some kind of reward or payoff for the PCs, information or loot or both — this is a frequent blind spot of mine!

Raymond Chandler: “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”

RPG version: “When in doubt, have some armed schmucks — or a monster — roll up and insert themselves into the situation.”

The “Hunter/Hunted” model straddles the line between session prep and in-game running. If the PCs don’t stop the bad guys, the bad guys enact a little more of their plan, the next fight gets a little harder, a little closer to home, or both.

For one-shots: if time’s running short and I don’t have time to get the PCs to the boss, I have the boss come to them. Or if the PCs are messing around not making progress. People get real focused when Darth Vader kicks down the door.

If a PC wants to do something not covered by the rules, I come up with fair odds, communicate the odds and the consequences, and let them roll for it. “I think that has about a 1 in 3 chance of working. So roll a d6, and if you get a 5 or 6, great, you did it. But if not, not only do you fall off the wall, but the guard is 100% going to hear you.” D10s are great for slicing probability into 10% increments (in fact I am very surprised that there haven’t been more D10-based systems in the history of RPGs [not counting full percentile systems]).

I let players narrate the result of a critical hit, a killing blow, or just any really impressive roll.

Wonderful Mike Mignola panel from the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser comic adaptation.

SESSION PREP

Once a campaign is up and running, I don’t need a lot of pre-cooked story (this paragraph is a little less relevant for one-shots and intros). I try not to plan or know in advance how the story is going to go in the session. As stories occur to me, I try to make them backstories: I invest them in the villains and their origins and their planned-but-not-yet-enacted plots.

Adversary goals and desires are good. Bad guys want X and will do Y to get it and will do Z to get away if necessary. Villain backstories and larger plans are great, because they tell me what the adversaries will do when things go off the rails — as they inevitably will.

When planning a session, I have a story idea that I hold loosely, or at least an inciting incident and some ideas of where things might go, but I try to think in game mechanics terms — what encounters will occur — what groups of NPCs and adversaries in what environments, and what information will I need at hand to run those encounters? Monster cards, spell cards, stat blocks, special abilities. Maps! Thinking in terms of game mechanics helps me prep.

At the table, in the moment, I think in story terms, not in game mechanics terms.
– Discover a story with the players, rolling and calling for rolls when necessary, as opposed to using the rolls as wheels for advancing a pre-planned story. Roll dice when the outcome is in doubt, or to focus player attention.
and
– Whatever my players choose to do, that’s the story. As long as everyone’s enjoying themselves, that’s the game. The goal is for everyone to have a good time, not to hit particular story beats.

The longer I do this, the less story I plan for each session, and the more I’m comfortable running long stretches with little to no rolling. On the other hand, players like to roll dice, and sometimes I call for lots of rolls just to keep everyone engaged and on their toes. Can be handy when things are dragging in that fifth hour of play but we’re not quite to a good stopping point.

Do plan for some loot: gold, weapons, armor, magic items. And then every few sessions, give the PCs an opportunity to spend some of that loot. Players love to go shopping.

Ginny Di’s DM says don’t write the story for the players, write the story that will happen if the players do nothing. I love that.

Recycle old PCs or book, movie, and video game characters as NPCs and adversaries (also works on the fly, in the middle of a session).

Finally, I think character generation should be ongoing, in that players should feel free to add bits of backstory or other refinements to their characters as the campaign goes on. And I actively try to dissolve the boundary between character generation and worldbuilding. In the campaign design document I created for the Saturday Night D&D group, I wrote:

If your character is trying to find the Goggles of Clairvoyance, escape the Sisterhood of Divine Poisoners, or ask a question of the 1000-year-old druid Dya Eterna, then those are things that now exist in the campaign world.

A pile-of-pictures-as-campaign-map thing I made for D&D with my brother.

WORLDBUILDING

Anything that I or my players know about the world other than what has come up in play is approximate, possibly incomplete, and subject to ongoing revision.

Have ideally just one Central Weirdness, from which all other problems flow.
Central Weirdness -> subsidiary weirdnesses -> knock-on effects -> those jerks over there:

• is basically an org chart for the bad guys, and an ascending scale of adversaries for the PCs to encounter;
• all of which outside of the Central Weirdness are fungible/swappable/replaceable, which has two salutary effects: I can dangle high-level lieutenants as nemeses for the PCs, but if the PCs manage to kill one, another can take its place (ideally the new baddie is a little tougher, and weird in some unique way, so this isn’t just musical chairs);
• AND (nearly) all fights or investigations eventually lead back to the Central Weirdness, which gives the campaign coherence and direction.

Along those lines, noir-ish crime stories are good DMing inspiration:

• usually more than one, maybe multiple Weird Things turn up, with no obvious or even plausible connections.
• as each Weird Thing is investigated separately, links start to appear — these will generally be surprising when revealed to the audience (i.e., the players).
• eventually all threads lead to the one Central Weirdness that set everything in motion.
• if it’s dragging on or getting too complicated, I can simplify things behind the screen; maybe instead of a long chain of cause-and-effect, Minion X did Deed Y because the BBEG just told them to, for its own mysterious reasons. Cthulhu gonna Cthulhu.

Having a couple of historical events to refer back to, to shade current events and give shape to the world, is really useful. For my current campaign, there’s the Demon War centuries ago that brought down the old empire and basically broke civilization, which is a continent- or planet-spanning world-building event. Then in the Vale specifically there was the Orc War 30 years ago, that shaped a lot of how the Vale is now — low population, fortified settlements, and not many orcs or goblinoids of any kind around.

Why I picked the Nentir Vale (the default setting for D&D 4E) for the Saturday Night D&D campaign: defined geography and factions, not immediately familiar to people who had played 5E before, and I could just drop the PCs in somewhere, give them a few rumors to chase down, and let things start pinballing.

The cover of The Book of Concealment, my favorite DM notebook. Everyone should have one or two of these things.

AND FINALLY…

Write everything down. Probably 50% of my baddie plots occur to me on long walks with my dog. And there are things I planned before the first session of the current campaign that still have yet to happen, or be discovered. But they’re in my notebook or Google Doc, biding their time.

Eleanor, my DMing muse. Possibly Almost certainly a trickster deity in dog form.

My strengths and weaknesses as a gamemaster

My Saturday night D&D group has been running roughly every other weekend for close to 15 months now. It’s definitely the biggest and longest-running campaign I’ve done for anyone other than my brothers or London. That’s given me a lot of opportunities to observe and reflect on my skills in prepping and running sessions.

At the same time, I have been making a conscious effort to get better at this stuff. To that end, I’ve watched a fair number of videos by Matt Colville, Ginny Di, Bob World Builder, Deborah Ann Woll, and others. I learn best by taking notes, and if a video really lands with me I’ll watch it a second time and scribble down the parts I want to remember. I found a couple that are about planning sessions, each of which included a list of things to do, which I then used as diagnostics in evaluating my own GMing.

From Matt Mercer’s video on writing one-shots, I got this list:

1. Assemble the PCs, build toward that
2. What will the theme and style be?
3. Create a strong, easily-read plot hook
4. Develop a climax, and a villain
5. Develop key NPCs to deliver useful info
6. Prepare social encounters
7. Plan player-tailored skill tests
8. Loot and other rewards
9. Outline key locations
10. Avoid a wandering intro
11. Keep the pace moving
12. Design character epilogues

And from Mike Shea at Sly Flourish I got the 8 steps for the lazy DM:

1. Who are the characters?
2. What is the strong start?
3. What scenes might occur?
4. What secrets and clues might they uncover?
5. What fantastic locations might they discover?
6. What NPCs might they meet?
7. What monsters might they face?
8. What magic items might they acquire?

There’s a fair amount of overlap on the lists, as you’d probably expect from two very skilled and very experienced DMs: build around your characters; start strong; prep locations, monsters, NPCs, and magic items; think about how information might be delivered to the PCs, or discovered by them; and so on.

Gearing up for a big fight in the Dinosaur Island campaign that I ran for London a freakin’ decade ago. Original post here.

I think everyone should own their successes and their strengths as much or more than their losses and areas for improvement, so here are some areas in which I think I’m pretty strong as a DM:

• Multiple factions
• Tiered threats
• Internally consistent world with consequences
• Varied locations, encounters, and monsters
• Being a fan of all of the PCs, and the players
• Letting PCs rock out
• Lots of NPCs with their own varied motivations
• Strong sense of direction to the campaign

The DIE comic by writer Kieron Gillen and artist Stephanie Hans approaches the Platonic definition of character-driven storytelling. Original post here.

And here some areas in which I’d like to improve:

On the PC side:

• incorporate backstories more, especially in planning
• incorporate ancestry and class features and abilities more, especially in planning

On the adversary side:

• pay more attention to special abilities beyond just to-hits
• use lair actions and environmental effects
• play them more tactically

On combat encounters:

• give characters real choices in game vs railroading
• create encounter goals other than slaughter (chases, rescues, escapes, ticking clock, complete or interrupt a ritual, etc.)
• make encounter areas more topographically and environmentally varied
• use weather
• limit player awareness
• put allies in danger

After encounters:

• be alert for opportunities to offer rests
• plan loot in advance — this is probably my biggest single weakness
• build in downtime activities
• make the world respond to the PCs — recognition, invitations, requests
• check in with players regarding intense sessions — we usually have at least a few minutes of post-session conversation to come down, but I could be more intentional about this

My favorite dice in the world: the Frozen Echo set from Tattered Troll. Good heavens, they have a lot of gorgeous dice.

Don’t worry, it’s not like I sit around beating myself up over any of this stuff. I really love running games, and I’m aware that it’s something that I can get better at with practice and deliberate thought. I’m posting this partly for myself, now, as a reminder; partly for my future self, to check back in a few years and see where I’ve improved the most (and the least!); and partly for any other GMs or DMs who may come across this post, to get their thoughts on their own strengths and weaknesses.

D&D: how I roll

Capturing this now for a few reasons:

1. This is the most organized I’ve ever been as a GM or DM — in fact, it’s the first time I’ve had a regular set of tools that I’ve used in essentially every session of a campaign — and I want to crystallize that.
2. My blogs are thought archives and I want to be able to look back in 5 years, or 10 or 20, and see where I was in 2025 and how things evolved from here.
3. Finally, maybe this will prove useful for someone else, whether you’re starting out, in quest of new methods, or seeking inspiration.

Here’s my current setup, explanations down below.

In very approximate order from most important to least:

Laptop — my current campaign is online, via Zoom. For the first few sessions I’d occasionally share my screen to show the campaign world map or an image of an environment or monster, but we did all of the encounters and combats using theater of mind. Then I was persuaded by Ginny Di that maps are a useful affordance for players (and, heck, for myself) during combats and other tense encounters, so I started using maps. Now I generally put all of the images for a session into a PowerPoint slideshow, including maps for combats, and we track positions, effects, kills, etc. using Zoom’s screen annotation tool.

Dice tray — keeps my dice from going haywire, and recently I’ve been rolling hit locations with it, too (see this post for more on that).

Notebook — this is where I will have written out some possible encounters, with events, NPCs, adversaries, and their motives and behaviors. I have all the information I’ll need for a session on a single two-page spread so I don’t waste time or risk getting lost flipping pages. I’m a big fan of the Book of Concealment but anything will do; I’ve run sessions off notes scribbled in the last 5 minutes on an index card. Speaking of:

Index cards — I keep an index card for each PC, and one each for allied NPCs, neutral NPCs, and adversaries. The card for each PC has their name, species, class, background, level, speed, AC, HP, and initiative roll written around the edges, with brief notes on origins, pets, magic items, etc. in the center. Not only are these super useful for helping me remember PC details in the middle of a session, I can easily put the cards in initiative order at the start of a combat to keep things (1) clear and (2) moving — 5 or 6 PCs fighting large groups of monsters in logistically complex scenarios can get real confusing real fast. I’ll often write down NPC names and track monster HP right on the relevant index cards, but I also keep a small stack of blank index cards for jotting down notes mid-session.

DM screen — most of the time, this is a pure safety net. I have random tables for environments, ruins, monsters, NPCs, magic items, and loot, with loot varying from “I search the body…” to “the queen grants you this boon”. If I have a fear as a DM, it’s getting caught flat-footed when a PC talks to a random NPC and having nothing there. And if I have a weakness as a DM, it’s that I don’t offer my players many opportunities to acquire treasure. Having the resources for both of those things right in front of my face makes me a calmer, better-prepared, and more generous DM. And hey, there’s the Book of Concealment again!

Mug of writing utensils — I don’t often need a sharpie, red pen, or highlighter mid-session, but once in a while I do. The mug also helps prop the DM screen open.

Something to drink — I drink a lot of water even when I’m not rolling, and talking dries me out. I usually have a pint glass of something, and a large water bottle as a backup.

Rulebooks — the one thing not shown in this photo, I usually have an empty chair parked to my right with whatever I might need to hand during the session. Usually that’s the PHB for looking up spells, and the Monster Manual, plus any third party material I might be using, or homebrew material that didn’t fit on my notebook spread.

Also not shown but within reach — the flimsy DM screen from the Essentials Kit for looking up conditions (more convenient than the PHB); Vornheim, Knave 2e, Cairn, and other books with useful random tables, all partly visible on the shelf right over the desk (the random books table in Vornheim saved my butt during a recent session); and my character sheet notepad because in the heat of DMing I sometimes forget what skills are available.

That’s me done. What does your play space look like?

Fun DM trick: invisible monster

Messing around with the good old Octyrannopus gave me an idea: maybe it could camouflage itself, like a cuttlefish? That seemed like a fun effect that I could readily simulate for my regular campaign players. The first step was to pop the monster, sans background, on top of the environment in which the PCs would encounter it — in this case, a river ford. I’m using GIMP here, but any image editing software that lets you play with layers would work.

Next I made a layer mask of the monster, copied the equivalent chunk of background, and placed it in a layer on top of the monster. I figured the camo wouldn’t be perfect, maybe something akin to the visible spectrum camo in the Predator movies, so the PCs would see a shimmer where the monster was. I simulated that with a 2-pixel Gaussian blur in the camo layer. If you can’t see it in the above image, click to embiggify. A couple of other details in that image: a big, soft-edged eraser tool ready to go in the lower left, and — importantly since I’d be sharing my GIMP screen with my players — layer names that don’t give anything away (middle right).

For determining hit locations I used the roll-the-die-on-the-monster-picture trick from a couple of posts ago.

And here’s what the players saw: as their attacks hit home, bits and pieces of the monster were revealed. As luck would have it, the first bits to get revealed were a hindfoot, some face tentacles, and the tip of the tail, and that was about perfect. I was prepared to fudge a little to have the tentacles show up early, just because a mass of tentacles waving around in mid-air at the business end of a giant shimmer-monster seemed like a great “WTF nope nope nope OMG we’re screwed!” moment for the players.

It was a good, tough fight. One of the casters hit the visible hindfoot with entangle, causing thorny vines to spring up. The Octyrannopus is strong as hell and crushed the strength saving throw, so as it kicked free in irritation its giant hindfoot sent a storm of thorn vine fragments flying right into the PCs’ faces. The dragonborn PC got in a solid breath-weapon hit that knocked out a swath of the camo. Several PCs scored hits and then a crit on the one exposed foot, and when the Octyrannopus inevitably tripped and fell, the barbarian was ready, and rolled a critical hit to decapitate the monster and end the fight.

Octyrannopus stat sheet

In prepping the session, I realized that I’d never pulled together all of the necessary rules and stats for the Octyrannopus into one place, so I did that, and here it is, in PDF and JPG. Yes, it’s one of the oh-screw-this whole-page stat blocks that we all love to hate, but it also put everything I needed for a boss monster I hadn’t run in a while right in front of my face, so good enough I reckon. I bumped up the XP because it’s smarter than a regular tyrannosaur, harder to hit, and gets an extra attack.

If you just want the short-short version: 3 attacks, +10 to hit, 2d8 or 3d8 plus a bit damage, dexterous tentacles, scary roar. Or make up whatever sounds reasonable for your campaign. Either way, have fun!

The Book of Concealment is a well-made notebook and DM screen in one

I got this because I’m a sucker for D&D merch and interesting notebooks, so it might as well have been aersolized narcotics. I didn’t have super high hopes for it — my last TTRPG tie-in notebook (not D&D-branded) started falling apart almost immediately. But I figured it was worth a shot.

I’m SO glad I took the leap, because this thing has become indispensable. It’s now the cornerstone of my travel D&D kit, and I use it anytime I’m running a game with limited space. I printed my own pages of most-used tables and info, cut them to size, and taped them inside the DM screen, which is surprisingly sturdy and functional. Boom, now this thing hits the table even more often than my original, full-size screen, because it’s just so handy. I have a set of mini resin dice that I keep in a mini Altoids tin — with those dice, this notebook/DM screen, and a writing utensil, I’m ready to roll.

Be warned, the tables on the inside are the ones I printed and taped in myself. The product as sold just has more art on the inside. Rather ironically, I ran D&D in person off and on from 2011 to mid-2024 and essentially never used a DM screen. Then started using a DM screen religiously in my online game, not to hide stuff from my players (which it can’t even do), but to put the information I need most right in front of me while I’m rolling. I deliberately down-sampled the above photo to not give away any secrets in case any of my players stop by, but in general terms, from left to right I have:

• reminders on how to make better encounters, and some hacks to save a failing encounter;
• d8 and d10 tables of environmental features, ruins, and monsters for the three environments my current campaign visits most (forests, hills, mountains);
• a bunch of ready NPCs for cities or villages, the wilderness, or either;
• loot and minor magical items, divided into non-magical, single use, recharging, always on, and weapons.

Everything that I could make into a random table to roll on, I did. This isn’t everything in the campaign world, not by a long shot. I use almost none of this when I’m planning sessions. This is my safety net for when the PCs go off the map. Instead of umm-ing and ahh-ing when the PCs take an unexpected shortcut through the mountains, I can roll some d8s and d10s to figure out that there’s a [frozen waterfall] next to a [burned village] that is now occupied by [perytons], and that if the PCs go into the village they may encounter [Alethra Hornraven, human fighter, tracking the elven assassin Narska the Asp]. Maybe the PCs will try to figure out who burned the village, or help Alethra hunt the assassin, or maybe they’ll fight a couple of perytons while trying to climb the frozen waterfall (which would be rad). The point is that in less time that it took to type this, I have enough D&D to keep the party busy for a while, and to give me some breathing room.

If Alethra sounds familiar, it’s because she was my original PC from the Dinosaur Island campaign (f’rinstance). Easiest quick-NPC trick in the world: recycle a PC from a previous campaign. You already know all about them.

Who is Narska the Asp? No idea, just a name to fill a slot on the table (maybe from the Vornheim city kit?). I’ll figure out what her deal is before the PCs get to her.

Back to the Book of Concealment. The included notebook is 7.25 x 9.25 inches. It’s softbound, and the back cover slides into a pocket on the right-most panel of the DM screen. Don’t let the softcover put you off — the pages are actually sewn in signatures, which automatically makes it nicer than the D&D 2014 core rulebooks (my Monster Manual has been shedding pages since about 2015). There’s a title page up front, a copyright page at the back, and 142 pages of graph paper in between. I can’t for the life of me figure out the scale of the graph paper. There are 4 boxes in 7/8 of a inch, or 9 boxes in 5cm, but the grid doesn’t seem to neatly line up with English or metric units, so… shrug. That’s weird but doesn’t bother me in the least, especially given how nice the rest of the package is.

The art is all nice. It’s cool. It gets the job done. I didn’t buy this for the art, but I wouldn’t fault anyone who did. I’ll put in this way: it looks nice enough that I wouldn’t have any qualms about bringing this to the table anywhere, for any audience.

How nice is this thing? I bought a couple of extra copies to keep around for the sad day it goes out of print. If you were interested enough to read this whole review, maybe get one or two for yourself (link).

Cool tricks with drop die hit charts

TL;DR put a picture of a being in your dice tray (skillfully executed or not), roll the damage die on the picture in the tray, get hit location plus damage in one go.

Everything else in this post is just how I got there, and some other interesting possibilities.

I have long been a fan of using drop die hit charts to rapidly get granular damage as needed in combat. I don’t use a drop die chart on every single hit, especially against minions, but they’re really nice for when damage needs to be flavorful, like when a PC gets bitten by a plague dog, or for boss fights.

These don’t need to be fancy — for the first four months of my current D&D campaign, I used this crappy blob-person that I sketched on an index card in like 4 seconds in the first or second session. Drop a d4, because they have the least tendency to bounce or roll away, and boom, instant read, even faster than using a hit location table.

(Why an index card? One, I use a lot of index cards while running D&D, for tracking PCs, NPCs, monsters, initiative, etc., and the index card drop die chart fits right into my existing system. Two, it’s an online campaign, my “game table” is just my desk, and I only clear enough stuff to make room for my DM screen, dice tray, notebook, and the aforementioned index cards alongside my laptop. Three, handy for when I travel. I should write follow-up posts about all of this stuff.)

What if the die falls off the outline? No problem, just use common sense and go to the body part the die fell nearest to.

It’s not perfect — sometimes you get a die that’s right between hand/thigh or head/shoulder and have to make a call (I’d go with whichever’s bigger). And it’s not immediately clear how the extra space around the figure should be divvied up; surely head shots don’t take up the entire top quarter of the card, but where’s the line?

Over the winter holiday I had some spare time so I drew a much better version, with explicit lines extending to the edge of the index card. No more guessing. If the die falls on a line, go with the majority side. The chest, abdomen, and pelvis also have expanded footprints to make their spatial representation a little more representative, since this is an all-hits no-misses chart.

The black and white version is a little busy for my taste, and in the middle of a game I need instantly readable results, so I colored my personal version just to make it that much faster. The blue-green-yellow-orange-red spectrum is in rough ascending order of how much you’d prefer to not get a penetrating wound there, using a mix of real-world medicine and action-movie logic, but really the colors are jus there for quick visual differentiation.

Recently I’ve had a some insights on how to make drop die hit charts even more broadly applicable and useful.

INSIGHT 1: ALMOST ANY PICTURE OF A MONSTER WILL DO

Although the basic humanoid drop die hit chart works fine for most humanoids and could be generalized to almost anything that’s a tetrapod (at least if you don’t care about tail hits), what about profoundly non-humanoid-shaped monsters like carrion crawlers, beholders, otyughs, and xorns? In descending order of effort:

A. Print out a picture, ideally whichever one you’re going to show your players so they know what the monster looks like, drop the die on that. This example starring an old favorite of mine, the octyrannopus from the Dinosaur Island campaign.

B. Do a quick-and-dirty sketch. This is a quick behind-the-DM-screen tool, it’s not going in the Louvre, who cares if it’s ugly if it help you run a satisfying combat.

C. If you can handle the d4 occasionally going off the page, just roll on the relevant picture in the Monster Manual (or whatever book has an image of the effed thing your PCs have to fight), do the imaginary-line-to-nearest-body-part if the die lands off the picture.

INSIGHT 2: DROP DIE CHART + DICE TRAY = NO MORE STRAY BOUNCES

I first had the idea to do this with an appropriately-scaled printout of the octyrannopus.

INSIGHT 3: JUST ROLL THE DAMAGE DIE ON THE DROP DIE CHART

Then I realized that my 4.75 x 6.75″ dice tray is a pretty good fit for my 4 x 6″ humanoid drop die hit chart, and I could just roll the damage die for one-stop shopping.

Before I had the idea to put the drop die hit chart in the dice tray, I used d4s because they went astray the least often and least far. But with the dice tray, the drop die can’t go rogue at all. Since you could theoretically roll any die you want, just use the appropriate damage die. If your PCs typically roll their own damage dice, then you’re back to rolling whatever die you want to get a hit location on a monster or a boss, but for monsters hitting PCs this simplifies and speeds things up just one notch further.

Another way to think about it if you’re not sold on using drop die hit location tables at all: rolling this way doesn’t take any longer or involve any more steps than rolling the damage die anyway; it will give you hit location and damage at once and then you can decide whether to use that information.

And that’s when I realized that I needed to start this long, indulgent post with a TL;DR.

Some reasons why Hera Syndulla rules

Hera Syndulla from Star Wars: Rebels is awesome for many reasons. She’s a great leader, who isn’t perfect, and doesn’t always succeed, and sometimes believes in people more than they deserve, and when she does succeed, it’s usually by being smart, determined, selfless, and brave — good character traits of her mind and heart — and not merely by being a talented pilot, which she also is. I could write for days about what a great, inspiring character she is, regardless of her species, skin color, and gender.

But Hera’s achievements hit different because she’s a green-skinned Twi’lek woman. Before Rebels, if you thought of a Twi’lek at all, or specifically a Twi’lek woman, or very specifically a green-skinned Twi’lek woman, probably the first one to come to mind was Oola, the enslaved dancer at Jabba’s palace. But now you probably think of Hera first, because she totally flipped the script for people like her. Her story, and that of her father, helped give Twi’leks back their agency.

And you realize that every enslaved Twi’lek — every enslaved sentient, full stop — is both a personal and family tragedy, and also a colossal loss of potential for the galaxy. Which is not a terrible object lesson from the use of slavery as a trope in Star Wars.

The Haunted Helm: an adventure for Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game

The surface of Despora: mountains, canyons, and mining pits.

I have an adventure out in the new issue of the Star Wars Adventurer’s Journal, called “The Haunted Helm” (download link at the bottom of this post). It started as an adventure that I wrote and ran for London back in 2019. Of all the adventures I’ve ever written and run, it is definitely my favorite, and it’s probably also the one that will transfer best to other GMs and other tables (I hope). Writing it up for the Adventurer’s Journal was my first ‘pandemic project’ back in April, so it’s really nice to have it finally done and out.

Entrance to the tombs

I wrote this for the venerable d6-based Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, published by West End Games in the late 80s and 90s, but I think it should transfer pretty easily to any space-based RPG. It would work as a Star Trek scenario, or in Firefly, or whatever. Heck, if you changed a bit of the setup you could set it here on Earth and run it as a contemporary or historical adventure for Call of Cthulu or a similar horror/investigation game. I reckon it would even work in D&D.

Edit: I know “The Haunted Helm” can work in other systems because back in May I ran it for Andy Farke, Sarah Nichols, and Thierra Nalley using Lasers & Feelings, which is my favorite light RPG for newcomers, one-shots, and pick-up games. The game is a free download here, and people have made about a million variants and hacks, for almost every conceivable genre. The list here is a good start if you want to go down that rabbit hole. I need to do a full post soon about Lasers & Feelings, but the point right now is that I also owe a belated thanks to Andy, Sarah, and Thierra for serving as beta-testers for this adventure. So thanks, folks!

The Hall of the Ancestors

I was quite happy with how “Durance Vile”, my first Adventurer’s Journal submission, turned out, but I knew I wanted to do more art for this one. Through my research in paleontology and human antomy, I have some experience as a technical illustrator (for example), but I’m not much of a creative artist. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m proud of the art I did for “The Haunted Helm”, but I’m happy with it, and I think it gets the job done. 

I also made maps. Lots of maps. In fact, I created the above map as a guide to the other three maps, to show how they fit together. I’m reproducing all the maps here so people can get the original full-res image files for printing, modifying, etc. I’m releasing all of my work in this post under the CC-BY 4.0 license, for you to do with as you see fit.

This second map covers two of the adventure locations: the top of the cliffs, where the PCs will presumably land their ship, and the canyon camp established by the missing archaeologists.

The third map takes the PCs into a tomb left behind by the Rakatan Empire, which terrorized the galaxy before the formation of the Old Republic.

Finally, in the fourth map the PCs confront the mysteries and terrors of an even older temple left behind by an abhuman race–including the titular haunted helm. 

“Put me on…”

I owe a big thanks to Brian L. Bird, the Editor In Chief of the Star Wars Adventurer’s Journal, who took all the bits I submitted and made them look great on the page, including throwing a cool macrobinocular frame around one of the illustrations, and adding a couple of nice pieces of additional art (a photograph of a cave interior, and a shot of the surface of Mars). The Adventurer’s Journal only exists and keeps moving forward because Brian keeps making it happen, but he doesn’t just keep it alive, he makes it look damn good. Thank you, Brian! 

And speaking of looking damn good, the fabulous and eminently Star-Wars-y cover art for the new issue is by Yvan Quinet. You can see more of his work at https://www.yvanquinet.com/.

Issue 6 of the Adventurer’s Journal should be up soon at the D6 Holocron, at the bottom of this page, and in the meantime you can download it at the link below. “The Haunted Helm” starts on page 150 and closes out the issue. I hope you enjoy reading it and running it. If you do run it, I’d love to hear how it goes down in the comments. 

Adventurers Journal 6 – The More Things Change – 2020-11-17

Review: Star Wars: Outer Rim is a light RPG in a board game box

One of my favorite new games is Outer Rim, the latest Star Wars board game from Fantasy Flight. I’ve played probably 8 or 9 sessions with my son, London, and one 3-player session with London and our friend Peter Kloess.

So what is this thing? In Outer Rim each player takes on the role of a scoundrel from the Star Wars universe. The goal is to become the most famous outlaw in the galaxy, by hauling cargoes, hunting bounties, and doing jobs in the galaxy’s Outer Rim. You travel to planets, collect goals, meet contacts, buy personal gear and upgrades for your starship, and try to avoid patrols–unless you happen to be in good with the faction whose patrol you’ve just encountered.

Fantasy Flight

It’s impossible for me to review this game in isolation, apart from other Fantasy Flight games, of which we have quite a few. I’ve blogged here before about the X-Wing Miniatures Game. In addition, London and I love the Star Wars Rebellion game and the Warhammer 40K game Relic, and we own some of the smaller-box games like Deadwood and Elder Sign. For me, and I suspect for a lot of other gamers, Fantasy Flight has earned a reputation based on these cornerstones:

• Very high production values. FF games aren’t cheap (although they’re also not ludicrously expensive when you look at similar games from other companies), but you will definitely know where your money went: big, lavish game boards, thick linen counters, high-quality miniatures and pawns, and beautiful art sharply reproduced with vibrant colors.
• Complex games with lots of moving parts that nevertheless end up being lots of fun and pretty well-balanced. It’s not a big-box Fantasy Flight game without half a dozen decks of cards, at least three kinds of counters, and proprietary dice with weird symbols, and that’s a bare minimum. The games are so complex that it’s hard not to sigh a little internally while punching out all the pieces and sorting out the cards. But on the other side of that is immersive gameplay with lots of paths to victory, decisions with real consequences, and interesting meshing of game mechanics and theme.
• Rulebooks that are a bit of a mess. If you own more than one FF game, you just start to expect that there is a great game in the box, hidden behind an almost aggressively mediocre rulebook, with key bits out of order and important points omitted. To be fair, this is something they’ve gotten better at over time, especially in recent years by splitting the rules into two books, a “Learn to Play” book that guides you through your first game, and a “Rules Reference” that serves as a dictionary to look up terms and game mechanics when you have questions (and you will have questions). But it’s pretty common to get halfway through your first game–or your third–and realize you’ve been playing the game subtly wrong all along.

So how does Outer Rim stack up against other FF games on each of those points?

Production Values

In a word, flawless. Star Wars is a visually stimulating universe and Star Wars games need to have great art to feel like they belong. Outer Rim definitely soars in this department. The art for the character spaceships in particular is phenomenal. I’m kind of a nut for “The Art of…” movie artbooks, and I wouldn’t mind having one just for this game.

Complex but Immersive Gameplay

I was worried about this while we were setting up the game the first time, because there are a lot of bits, even for an FF game. Not so many counters, but a lot of different kinds of cards. While you’re playing the game there will be 14 stacks of cards sitting on the table: six decks of Market cards, representing different things you can acquire (personal gear, starship upgrades, crew members, cargoes, bounties, jobs, etc.), seven decks of planet and space encounters, covering 11 planets and two kinds of deep-space encounters, and the Data Deck, which has a bit of all of the above plus flavor text and rules for various encounters, like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book in the form of a stack of cards. And yet this is not overwhelming in actual play because you typically only interact with a single thing at a single time. If you’re on a planet, you only have to think about what might be lurking in that planet’s encounter deck, not the other six. If you are buying from the market, you can see six cards face-up on top of their respective decks, and those are the six things you can choose to buy at that moment. If you dive into the Data Deck, it will be because another card told you to resolve, say, card #42.

It soon becomes clear what all those cards are for, and why there are so many of them: they’re serving the role of the gamemaster. Outer Rim looks like a board game, but it waddles and quacks like a roleplaying game. You have a unique character with unique abilities, which you can improve over time. You buy a ship and upgrade it, recruit crewmembers, earn and spend credits, and explore the galaxy. It doesn’t go on forever–there’s no campaign mode for this game–but for the two or three hours that you’re playing, it feels like a blend of RPG and board game. There’s no tactical infinity, but you do have a lot of choices, and at any given moment you are somewhere in a chain of consequences based on your past actions and those of the other players.

This realization–that Outer Rim is really a light RPG with the job of the gamemaster outsourced to the game itself–came as a surprise to me, because I’d gotten used to think of wargames/board games as fundamentally different things from RPGs. And I don’t want to overstate the RPG-ness of Outer Rim. It’s hardly the first board game in which you take on the role of a unique character and have some imaginary adventures, and the limited selection of characters and bounded set of things to do each turn is very different from the vastly more open world of true RPGs. Probably best to put it like this: if you come to Outer Rim expecting all the crazy fun and no-holds-barred decision-making that RPGs allow, you’ll probably be disappointed, but if you come in expecting the very limited set of possibilities inherent in most board games, you’ll probably be pleasantly surprised.

Messy Rulebook (and/or Steep Learning Curve)

Pretty good! It wouldn’t be an FF game if there wasn’t at least one incomprehensible omission. Here’s the one for Outer Rim: you complete Jobs during the Encounter phase, so if you complete a Job, that’s your Encounter for that turn. That nugget is buried in the Rules Reference, where it is mentioned exactly once in the entry on Jobs. It is never mentioned in the Learn to Play guide, and it is absent from the Player Reference cards, for no good reason that I can see. And it really matters, because along with capturing bounties and delivering cargo, doing jobs is one of the main paths to victory.

On the upside, and despite the seeming complexity of all the bits mentioned above, we got the hang of Outer Rim much more quickly than any other FF game. Usually we have both rulebooks out all the time, even for games we’ve played half a dozen times before, like Relic and Rebellion, because we’re referring to them on a regular basis. After the first 45 minutes or so, we’ve barely had to crack open the books for Outer Rim at all, and when we have, it’s mostly been to confirm something we thought we knew, rather than to discover how a basic game mechanic works in the first place. It was honestly refreshing to see how, through some alchemy of good game design, the physical complexity of the game produced a gameplay experience that was easy to learn but still interesting and engaging in its effects.

You’ll probably want to pick up some of these to hold all the bits. I found them at the local dollar store.

Time to Play, and Replayability

So far, all the games we’ve played have taken about three hours. You can adjust the length of the game by playing to different amounts of Fame. The default is 10, the rulebook recommends 8 for your first time playing, and the tracker on each character card goes to 12. While we’ve been playing, though, we haven’t wanted the game to end. So London and I have been talking about alternative victory conditions, like first player to save 50,000 credits, or first one to have an encounter on every single planet.

Replay value for this game is very high. After our first two 3-hour games we’d seen most or all of the bounties and jobs, but we’d seen probably less than half of the planetary encounters and maybe only a sixth of the personal gear deck. I didn’t track how much of the Data Deck we’d seen, but also probably less than half. And I think there were still one or two contacts (essentially NPCs) that we hadn’t yet encountered. After half a dozen more games, I think we’ve seen all the marketplace items, but there are still some planetary encounters and some Data Deck things we haven’t run into yet. There’s so much in this game that even after you’ve seen all of it, there’s no way to hold it all in your head. And so much of each particular game is going to depend on the choices made by the other players that I don’t think it could ever become stale or predictable. London and I probably had more fun exploring this game, in terms of just working through all of the possibilities inherent in the box, than we have with any other board game.

I should mention that there is a solo variant, in which a separate AI deck makes the decisions for a single opponent. I haven’t played that yet, so I can’t comment on how well it works, but I’m glad the option is there.

Theme

This game oozes Star Wars. It has characters and ships from the movies, TV shows, novels, and comics. If you ever wanted to play Dr. Aphra, teaming up with Hera Syndulla to take down Dr. Evazan on Mon Calamari, or you’d like Han Solo to fly Slave 1 against a Syndicate patrol at the Ring of Kafrene, this is the game for you. You’ll track down bounties, deliver illegal cargo, dodge Imperial patrols, run into dangerous criminals, and have mysterious encounters in deep space.

The game constantly forces you to make tough decisions that arise from the consequences of your actions, and those of other players. Maybe your ship was damaged on a job, and now you have to decide whether to spend your turn on the same planet getting it fixed, and risk getting caught by a hostile patrol, or to flee into deep space with a ship that might fail if you’re forced into another fight. Most of the bounties have an elimination bonus and a larger delivery bonus; you get the former for finding and defeating a bounty, and the latter for doing the same plus hauling the poor sucker halfway across the galaxy. Sometimes that’s worth it for the extra money or fame, sometimes it’s not, and either way, you’ll find yourself somewhere else in a chain of consequences.

One trap that plagues some board games, and which Outer Rim neatly sidesteps, is mechanics that are admittedly nifty but basically naked. For example, maybe you need to collect 6 cards to beat the end boss, when there’s no good in-game reason for it to be 6 cards versus 4 or 7, or for it to be cards at all. So you put on a brave face and pretend to be doing whatever thematic thing the 6 cards represent, but really, you’re just collecting 6 cards and you know it, so it feels artificial and game-y.

In contrast, it’s hard to even talk about the problems and challenges you’ll face in Outer Rim in purely mechanical, non-thematic terms. If you’re deciding whether to take the long-but-safe path, and risk having another player scoop up a prime bounty while you’re twiddling your thumbs in deep space, or the short-but-dangerous path, and risk having to fight a Hutt patrol, it will be because you have to deliver stolen weapons to Ryloth, which means actually getting your ship physically to Ryloth. If you buy a vibroknife or a grenade launcher, it won’t be some hollow buff just to round out your character, it will be because you have to capture a Wookiee mercenary, or you’re worried that Dengar will pound you like a tent stake if you run into him on Nal Hutta.

From your very first job, cargo, or bounty, you’ll be catapulted into an ongoing chain of decisions and consequences. Dump one cargo to take on a more valuable one, even if it means flying farther to deliver it? Spend those credits on upgrades for your ship, or information that could lead you to a big score? Stay put and heal, or push on and risk losing a critical fight? For much of the game, you’re just knocking around the galaxy, having crazy adventures and getting into scrapes while you do Star Wars stuff. The only really game-y aspect is the pressure to earn more fame than the other players, which turns what could be a more aimless space adventure game into a challenge in which resource management, efficient movement, and knowing where and when to fight are all important. The winner doesn’t win because of some arbitrary game clock or ‘gotcha’ mechanic, it’s because they invested their credits wisely, picked their battles carefully, and in the end, just did more awesome stuff than their competitors. And even if you lose, the game is still ridiculously fun. The path to victory is long enough that everyone will have the opportunity to cross the galaxy once or twice, earn a lot of dough, upgrade their character and their ship, and ultimately play out a story of back-alley deals, fighting bad guys, and avoiding Johnny Law.

You can start out as Han Solo, but you’ll have find Chewbacca to hire him, and you won’t be flying the Falcon at first.

Conclusion

Bottom line, Outer Rim feels like Star Wars, specifically the scruffy, Fringe-oriented aspect of heavily armed lowlifes on the make. It plays in a single afternoon or evening, so you don’t have to invest an entire day or weekend to get through a single game (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, but other games have that covered). It has a lot of moving parts, but you’re generally only interacting with one at a time, and all of that machinery does the job of a gamemaster so everyone at the table can play a character. And while you’re playing, you’ll be thinking about wretched hives of scum and villainy, that bounty hunter you actually did run into on Ord Mantell, and how a death mark is not an easy thing to live with. And all this for fifty bucks. If you’re a Star Wars fan, this one is a no-brainer. Highly recommended. Here’s the link.

Review: Mythic Odysseys of Theros is an awesome tool for DMs

From what I’ve seen, the campaign books for D&D 5e just keep getting better and better. London and I have picked up three of the recent releases: Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount, Eberron: Rising from the Last War, and most recently Mythic Odysseys of Theros. Each one has a LOT of tools for DMs looking to run a campaign. The Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount has a nice big folded world map in the back, and much of the book is given over to a gazetteer, with a short list of adventure hooks for virtually every mapped location on the continent of Wildemount. Even though we haven’t started a Wildemount campaign yet, just reading those adventure hooks gave me ideas for our Faerun campaign.

Then I picked up a copy of Mythic Odysseys of Theros. Hoo boy, this book is completely packed with gameable ideas.

A quick bit of background: the Greek-myth-inspired world of Theros was first introduced in Magic: The Gathering, and it’s the second M:TG world to get a D&D campaign guide (after the Guildmasters’ Guide to Ravnica). Theros has a pantheon of 15 deities, which are reminiscent of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses while not mapping perfectly to any individual figure from real-world mythology. At first I thought it would be a pain to get acquainted with all of the new deities–15? really?–but the book does a great job of introducing them, their squabbles, and the mortal people and populations that get caught up in their intrigues and conflicts.

Ephara, God of the Polis

The deities of Theros are actually covered twice. In Chapter 2, “Gods of Theros”, each deity gets a 3-page writeup that includes the god’s influence, goals, relationships to other deities, worshippers, champions, divine favors, and divine rewards for those PCs that give their piety to that god. There is also a beautiful half-page color painting of each god, set above a set of in-universe myths relating to the god. Then in Chapter 4, “Creating Theros Adventures”, each god gets another 4 pages, covering the god’s quests, villains, monsters, and schemes, how to use the god as a campaign villain, plus a mapped location with a full-page map plus adventure hooks and potential villains to encounter in that location.

At first I didn’t understand why the material for each god was segregated between Chapters 2 and 4; why not mash it all together in a single 7-page “god-guide”? But when London and I made up characters for a Theros campaign, and I started thinking about possible adventures, I realized why the book is arranged this way: Chapters 1 and 2, “Character Creation” and “Gods of Theros”, are the player’s handbook for Theros. The next three chapters, “Realms of Gods and Mortals”, “Creating Theros Adventures”, and “Treasures” are the DM’s guide, and the 6th and final chapter, “Friends and Foes”, is the monster manual.  The gods get covered twice because there are two sets of information for each: that needed by a player whose character might serve, honor, or oppose a given god, and that needed by the DM to run the god in their campaign.

So far, so good. What sets Mythic Odysseys of Theros apart is the number of gameable ideas packed into its 256 pages, particularly for the gods. The ‘player’s handbook’ material in Chapter 2 includes suggested alignments, classes, cleric domains, and backgrounds for PCs who might serve each god, plus d6 tables of divine favors and ideals relating to that god. Chapter 4 is even better: the quests, villains, and schemes for each god are represented by a d6 table, the monsters by a d8 table ordered by challenge rating, and the mapped location for each god has tables of anywhere from 8 to 12 adventure hooks and at least 6 suggested villains. So between chapters 2 and 4, each god gets at least 7 tables of stuff. There is also a wonderful spread on pages 112-113 with d6 omens for each of the 15 deities. So make that 8 tables of ideas for each god.

The mapped locations are particularly nice (see an example below). The locations themselves are varied, including temples, towers, an arena, a forge, healing pools, exterior locations (canyon and forest), and of course a labyrinth. The full-page maps–by Dyson Logos!–are exceptionally clean and readable, with minimal coloring so they’ll reproduce well when photocopied or printed out (I know because I’ve printed them all for future use). Most of the maps are big enough and complex enough to support at least one full session, if not more, and the sheer variety gave me a lot of ideas for repurposing other maps for a Theros campaign. It bears repeating that there are 15 such locations–normally you’d be lucky to get half as many fully mapped locations in a book this size.

In fact, the more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed. How did the creators pack so much good stuff into the book? Then I realized that in most books, each of the locations would have had pages and pages of keyed information, like “This room is full of wine flasks”, or “A hungry chimaera makes its lair here”, only with 1-2 paragraphs of yap per room, so that a single small location would need 5 pages and a big one 10 or 12. In Mythic Odysseys of Theros, each location gets just two pages–the map on one page, and a short writeup with tables on the facing page. However–and this is the crucial part–that’s all I really need. I’m a DM, I’m used to making my own maps or repurposing published ones. I can figure out for myself which rooms are used for storage, which ones are functioning spaces, which might have been taken over by monsters, etc. (or, if I lacked inspiration, I could number the rooms myself and roll on a table for the contents). And if I was just starting out and didn’t know how to stock a dungeon, the tables of adventure hooks, monsters, and villains would give me plenty of ideas (and still do!).

 

For DMs, Mythic Odysseys of Theros trades depth of detail for a diversity of ideas. And frankly, as a DM, I need the latter a lot more than the former. It’s the classic “give a person a fish, or teach them to fish” dichotomy. Long, detailed writeups of each location would give me a lot of crap I’d have to remember, or look up on the fly, and which I would probably revise or just ignore when I ran the location anyway. By going detail-light but idea-dense, the book’s creators were able to give me a lot more locations, and the number of potential applications of each one (and the potential reusability) is sky-high. The Coastal Temple of Thassa, goddess of the sea, might be a functional temple, or an ancient pilgrimage destination, or maybe it’s just been flooded by a tsunami, or taken over by monsters, or, or, or…you get the idea. Fifteen locations with a dozen suggested adventures for each one is a whopping 180 combinations. And sure, I’m not going to run each location 12 times, but I can certainly find or create maps of equivalent depth and use additional adventure hooks and villains related to each god for future adventures.

(If you need or want a little more guidance on running encounters in mapped locations, either because you’re starting out or because you need to run a weekend game for your nieces and nephews and don’t have time to do much adventure prep, that’s fine! Far be it from me to tell anyone they are doing it wrong. Happily for you, almost every published adventure for 5e will give you room-by-room maps and more detailed support. Theros has no training wheels or seatbelts, but a million cubbyholes, USB jacks, and cupholders. It’s up to you to decide if that style fits your own.)

In addition to all of the aforementioned adventure fuel, the book also has a 10-page starting adventure with yet another mapped location and more tables. Plus four pages apiece on running nautical adventures and underworld adventures, each with–you guessed it–even more tables. And not just boring stuff I could have thought of myself, like “this island is volcanic”, but “this island is a dense layer of seaweed that has developed its own ecosystem of strange beasts and trapped sailors” (p. 177), or it’s a fallen fragment of heaven, or a paradise that tempts visitors to never leave, or (my favorite) the dream of a sleeping deity–and what happens when the deity wakes up? Sure, I could probably think of most of those given enough time, but given enough time you can recreate all of human technology starting with rocks and fire. The point of useful tools is that you can get to work building other things instead of building the tools themselves. Mythic Odysseys of Theros is a useful tool, and probably the most useful and most DM-facing product yet produced for D&D 5e.

That’s not to say that the player options aren’t also excellent. There are new playable races: minotaurs, centaurs, satyrs, and a humanoid lion race called the leonin (some of the others have appeared in other books by now, but they were new to me); a new background, the Athlete; and a host of divine gifts, omens, and prophecies to help flesh out PCs. The divine patronage options alone will give you plenty to think about, and they’ll get the players started with some gameable relationships right out of the gate.

Chapter 6, the section on monsters and foes, presents information on three categories on creatures and constructs: first, some notes on how to run 10 of the most Greek-themed monsters from the Monster Manual (basilisk, cyclops, medusa, sphinx, etc.), then stats and descriptions for 49 new monsters, and finally a section on “mythic monsters”. This is a new category for D&D 5e: super-monsters that not only get legendary actions, but also mythic actions that kick in when they are reduced to 0 hit points the first time. Yes, the first time, because the mythic traits give these walking catastrophes either a pile of temporary hit points, or new targets to destroy (the four hearts of the mega-kraken Tromokratis, revealed when its carapace cracks open), plus new legendary actions. If you’re worried about keeping your players busy between levels 15 and 20, these awesome adversaries should give them something to tilt at. There are only three mythic monsters detailed in the book, but you could apply similar logic to other monsters to create mythic versions of your own.

As a final plus, Mythic Odysseys of Theros is just gorgeous. A lot of pretty amazing M:TG art got repurposed for the book, and the new art is also excellent, giving the book a cohesive feel and really selling the idea of a mythic world of gods and monsters.

Are there downsides? I’m very visually oriented and to keep the pantheon straight I could have used a diagram showing the gods in their domains (heavens, sea, underworld, etc.), although there is a table, so that’s a pretty minor nitpick. As with many of the 5e books, I have my doubts about the longevity of the binding under heavy use. After 5 years, some pages are falling out of our Monster Manual, and our Dungeon Master’s Guide is on the cusp of losing pages. You may want to put some post-its or flags to help you find content quickly, but that’s true of every game book. On the flip side, Mythic Odysseys beats most D&D books by having a consistent layout for each god–the tables for each god are on the first two pages, map and tables relating to the location on the next two, and so on, to minimize flipping around while you’re prepping or running a session. This conservation-of-page-flipping extends throughout the book, and it is most welcome. Having material unnecessarily split across more than one spread has been my major gripe with virtually every other D&D 5e product–I hate having to flip pages to find out that room 11 is “storage”, when there was room on the map to just write “storage” on that room!

But now I see that I’ve lost the plot and veered back into praising the book. Oh well, sez me: the praise is earned. Even if you never run a Theros adventure, or play D&D at all, if you are into tabletop RPGs I think it’s worth picking up this book to see a campaign book done right, and to get ideas for whatever world or game you do run. Highly, highly recommended.