Good morning, everybody… leading into Christmas and the New Year, we’re back and posting. And, while we have you, we want to showcase what our next few months of update are going to be (primarily).
Our three post-series right now are:
Traps to Worry Your Players, where we try and put together traps and traplike
situations that go a little beyond “pit in the ground”. These can be a little wordy (as good, surprising traps require knowing the pre-conditions, effects, resolutions, post-conditions, etc.) and include the narrative and historical flair we attach to literally everything here at MSD. We want you to look at them and find one that speaks to you or feels like a natural compliment to your campaign and part of that is a taste of why such a thing would exist and what kind of origins or purposes it might have had in our own homebrew-esque “setting”. While many homebrew sources lean on just mechanics, we want you to feel like you understand the trap’s meaning as well.
12 Nights in Greyghast, where we’re using our own Eberron game as the
foundation for an entry level homebrew module system. Greyghast is a small city-state nestled between the great nations of the world that was founded by the refugees, fleeing nobles, merchants, criminals, betrayed heroes, etc. from the Last War. This project is us fleshing out NPCs, politics, factions, places of interest, districts, faiths, and snippet adventures for PC’s to play a squad of guards over the course of nearly two weeks in a city where there is something happening everywhere. Despite being set entirely “in town”, the pace and volume of “side quests” (and it’s all small side quests, dozens of them happening all the time around the players whether they interact or not) means its a game of resource management, time and money management, social combats, physical and magical crimes and events, mysteries, investigations, and crossing-paths with many common fantasy RPG tropes from the “guards in town” side (one of my favorite stories in the game is the party of adventurers coming to Greyghast and leaving a string of misdemeanors all over town from roughing up shopkeeps, causing fights in inns, offending the nobility, etc. and the PCs are the guards, having to deal with these adventurers every other day or so until they’re locked up or run out of town).
Kingdoms of Kalamar: Legacy, where due to our love of the Kingdoms of Kalamar setting that used to be a proper and official (and in our opinion “best”) setting for D&D back in 3rd edition, we’re working on our own carefully tested conversion of the major elements of the game. Kalamar was a setting that won awards and was lauded for providing what Forgotten Realms and Eberron just didn’t… a very low fantasy detailed realism. Not the gritty feel of Dark Sun, but more like Game of Thrones with clear D&D elements. Kalamar had a phenomenal world map, detailed history, strong and sharp political background, and probably the most developed Divine system for any setting. A world where arcane magic is rare, but because who has the time (luxury) and money to study books and deal with reagents and histories? Aristocrats? Nobles? On the otherhand, with nearly four dozen gods and goddesses–all with their own detailed temple ranks, variant cleric powers, custom role in the world… for the residents of Kalamar, “magic” means the gods. A world without a “common” tongue, where humans of one place hardly speak the language of the humans of a nation only a few hundred miles away. Its a setting where trade, commerce, the wars of nations, influence of the churches, the building of new kingdoms amidst the crumbling of old empires… all comes together. And, we’ll be adding onto the setting with updates to the world based on our own games in it. The homebrewing of many of these elements takes some delicate balancing, but for those who loved and miss Kalamar? We want to help you out (and you can see our love and how we’ve been influenced by the world in most of the flavor stories of our Better Than Nothing items and our header image is an amazing fan made drawing of events and characters from those series’ of games). You can peek at our old Obsidian Portal site for one of our old games’ posts.
Upcoming Posts that we are intending to provide while making these series in the coming weeks include two big experiments:
First, we’re going to film one of our sessions of play and post it up. Not an ongoing thing, so nobody need be too worried about getting invested in some week over week show–but one good, multicamera set up and you can see how we play and what the feel of our D&D is.
Second, we’re going to share our review of our favorite play accessories. Over the years, we’ve tried almost all of them… from Gale Force 9 cards to Chessex mats to Kaplow dice to Paizo grids to Reaper minis to etc., etc., etc. There are a lot of things out there, and we have a ton of them, but we also have our favorites.
That’s all for today. While we believe in a philosophy of “content, content, content” when it comes to updates, we had to get some news out of the way for our readership.
Thanks, peace out.
-F
Many-Sided Dice 
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