40K-ish Friday - Battletech Gothic

 

I'm so glad to see the return of one of my favorite out of print GW ... wait it's what? From who? Well, alright ...

I waited a week to let this thing percolate before I posted on it but my thoughts on it haven't changed and they come down to 3 main questions: 

• Who is this for? 
• Who is excited about this? 
• Is this the best way to spend your resources on building the BT game?

Prologue:

I've been playing Battletech for a long time. I've had ebbs and flows as far as my time and interest level but it's never gone completely away and I still have the first miniatures and books and things I bought back around 1986. I've been playing 40K since it came out in 1987 and I've been playing Warhammer Fantasy since the second edition came out in 1985. Yeah the 80's were a busy time. 

I've never heard anyone say, while playing Battletech, "I wish this game was more like 40K". Not once. Ever. 

When BT came out there were some surface similarities. The 3025 universe was post-apocalyptic in that much technology had been lost, very few places could make new mechs and even making parts for them was rare. Most mechs were repaired and rebuilt from salvaged machines and components. It made even a lance of four mechs a considerable force in the lore. Scenario books recreating "historical" confrontations would mention which mechs were present and what kinds of damage should be applied to them pre-battle to represent that bad leg actuator or missing laser. They got away from that aspect of the setting pretty quickly though and eventually that lost tech thing and damaged mechs being a standard expectation disappeared. Nowadays we have thousands of new mechs being constructed every year, not to mention the whole Clan situation.

Today it's much more of a "future Tom Clancy" type setting with new technology and specific weapons platforms taking the lead alongside political machinations between the houses and clans and whatever version of ComStar exists at the time. This makes for decent novels  and provides plenty of hooks for a campaign whether purely BT or going full RPG. It's "clean" in comparison to something like 40K - not a lot of tentacles, if you know what I mean.

But now we have this latest effort. Yes, I assumed it was an April Fool's joke. It's not. Alright so ...

Who is supposed to be excited here? 

Is this to try and draw in 40K players? I would think a lot of them would already be aware of Battletech as a game between the Battletech PC game from ten years ago or so,  the more recent Mechwarrior 5, and the resurgence of tabletop BT driven by Catalyst's Kickstarters  and boxed sets and new miniatures over say the last 5 years. I'd say Battletech has a much higher profile in the last 5 years than it had before - since the 90's at least. So I don't think awareness is a problem.

A part of this may be the thinking that if you make it look like 40K it will get more attention from that crowd. Well, maybe, but I don't think so. It appears to be mostly the same game underneath and that's a very different animal than any version of 40K. The look is only a part of the appeal of 40K.

• Both games have been building up their lore for roughly 40 years. BT is a combination of Historical Novel and Techno-Thriller. 40K is Epic Myth and Action Movie. The feel, the "vibe" is completely different between the games and the universes. People like the "grimdark" and 40K originated the grimdark - taking on the original when it's as strong and popular as it has ever been seems like a mistake. Battletech has strong lore but it is completely different than Warhammer 40,000 (no aliens, no psychic powers, no AI) and making a new offshoot of that is putting your new lore, unsupported by any prior products, up against the massive juggernaut that is the Warhammer Universe. 
  
  
  

  

  You know what quote goes here don't you?

  
  
•  There is also the scale and scope of the game. BT tends to focus on mech action with a side dish of tanks, infantry, and aircraft for some players. I'd say 20 models per side is a big game in BT. In 40K the focus is driven per-army and could be a 100+ infantry on one side against fewer than 10  Knights or superheavies on the other - typically it is a mix of both. The look of a "typical" game of each looks wildly different as far as terrain, unit type, unit count. A lot of BT games happen on a hexmap, even with the miniatures, while a 40K game is always a pure measuring tape on an un-gridded table kind of game. 
  
  Most people could play both without much effort but most people also have a preference for on or the other and despite BT's standard approach being easier to set up I'd say 40K's approach  has more popularity and that's not likely to change by putting gribby monsters into the robot game. 
• Speaking of monsters let's talk about that. They're putting some kind of monsters/kaiju into the Gothic game. That's a huge change for Battletech. That's breaking at least one of the main rules of the universe and hey it might broaden the appeal. I've thought for a long time that a "mechs vs. kaiju" type option for BT would get some attention but I was envisioning something more like Pacific Rim than chaos beasts and daemon engines from Warhammer. So I like them working this angle in somehow, but then they go and leave them out of the boxed set! It's all mechs, and I believe it's alternate sculpts of mechs that already have new miniatures! This is effectively the starter box for a new setting and you can't include the very thing that makes it different from the old setting? That seems like a terrible decision. Even including paper stand-ups of the monsters is a fail - that may work for Battletech players but that hasn't been acceptable for 40K players since 1993 ... and it's still a meme today.

Who is this for? 

Effectively there are 3 groups at play here: Existing Battletech players, Existing 40K/Other miniature game players, and people who are not actively involved in any of these games at this time. 

• Existing (and lapsed) Battletech players: Existing players seem to be somewhat split on this one. I see a few people saying give it a chance. I see a lot of people not liking it at all - for various reasons. I can sum up my own take as a BT fan like this:
• If I want Gothic 40K exists and does it better than anyone has done or is doing
• As an existing player and fan of the only setting they've had up until now splitting this off into an "Elseworlds" side story means I can just sit this one out. It has no impact on the story I like and know and I have no history with it so unless I just really want to have my Thunderbolt punch a Great Uncelan One in the face I can skip this. It's the first boxed set in years that the core Battletech fan can ignore. And if I want to have a big robot punch a big demon in the face ... again, 40K exists. 
• Also a new setting and a new style of mech and the introduction of monsters means I would need to consider building up one or two new armies just for this game. Or I could just keep adding mechs and other forces to the stuff I use in the main game. 
  
  The one real opportunity here might be with people who stopped playing Battletech at some point because it was boring or the universe seemed stagnant or they were just burned out. This does give a new type of combatant and a new look to the old combatants and that might be enough to convince some people to check it out.
  
  
• Existing 40K/GW players: They mostly don't care about Battletech - or any other miniatures game either. 
• This is the main factor they are up against: the general arrogance of Games Workshop players. A large number of 40K players only play 40K and if they do play another tabletop game it's another GW game like Age of Sigmar or Kill Team. GW markets it as "the Games Workshop Hobby" and a lot of people buy into that - they won't even look at another miniatures game. This is something that all other miniature games face and it hurts Kings of War, it hurts Flames of War, it hurts Bolt Action, it hurts Crisis Protocol, and even the Star Wars games. Many of the companies publishing miniatures games today were founded by ex-GW employees and they often view the GW customer as their customer but the Fortress of Arrogance is not just for Comissar Yarrick. Non-GW games are looked down upon and dismissed as inferior by many of the people playing 40K and the other GW games. One element of this is popularity - as in, if Game X is good then why isn't it more popular? Battletech is reasonably popular but I don't think it measures anywhere near the numbers 40K hits in sales, convention & tournament attendance, and online presence. This new take might help but I don't think it's going to make a big dent in the state of things.
• Lapsed 40K players might be a different story as there is a fairly high turnover in those games and they often come out of it looking for something new. For them BT's rules barely changing in 40 years will be a feature when compared to GW's 3-year cycle and constant FAQs and points updates. A more 40K-like version of Battletech might gain some followers here.
  
  
• People who don't play miniature combat type games at all right now: I don't think this is likely to pull in much at all as these people also don't care. If they did, they'd be playing 40K or BT already and if they're new they will probably pick one of those "pure" options instead. A new RPG that's more like 5E D&D would likely pull in more new players to the BT universe than a new flavor of tabletop Succession Wars.

Finally, resources: 

Assuming you can only support one boxed set for Battletech per year - and they've needed Kickstarters to do that - then is this a good move for the game, the players, and the brand in general? Players are already talking about this taking resources from the main game. 

• Some miniature sets have already been delayed. Players don't like it when announced projects are held up for a surprise side-project
• There are major areas of the game that could use a refresh -like fighter combat. Wouldn't a cool boxed set of new spacefighter miniatures featuring a streamlined air/space combat system make more sense? It would give a new (refreshed at least) angle on things and still tie into the main universe. Your goal should be something like X-Wing which was really popular for a few years until the company screwed it up: A game based on small numbers of units playable in a relatively short amount of time by more casual fans. This would also provide an avenue to draw new players in to the rest of the game, allow an option to upscale things by making a Dropship expansion, and potentially tie in to a capital ship combat game (which they have said is in the works) by introducing ships and characters to new players and re-introducing them to the old players who may not have cared about space combat for years. Note that this is not "reprint Aerotech with new art" - this should be a new system that makes it simpler than and distinct from classic Battletech but can still interact with it in some way. That's just one example.
• They've talked about supporting the new line with additional miniatures - many of which would not fit in with or be usable with at all in regular Battletech games. Yet another resource draw.
• There is also talk of this being the first of an ongoing series of parallel universe games. This from a company that's had trouble keeping elements of their main game in stock. Now you're going to have a bunch of "stub" universes with limited support alongside the main game? They mentioned a more anime-flavored universe, a 50's style retro-tech universe (aiming for the Fallout crowd?), maybe a steampunk universe ... but what does that do for me as a player? That mostly sounds like alternate mech designs but how does the game change? If it's just republishing the same mechs over and over  - as we see with Gothic - who cares? That is seriously catering to existing fans, not attempting to expand the game or bring in new ones. Support is a real question - in 5 years how much support will there be for Gothic? For whichever other universes get the greenlight?  Will there be Technical Readouts? Timeline updates? Novels? What's the realistic lifespan of these things?

So yes, I'm pretty negative on Battletech Gothic. I totally understand wanting to expand the product line but this just seems like a misstep and a sidetrack.  Additionally this year's hot new 40K challenger is Trench Crusade which is also grimdark and violent and has all of the usual make-your-parents-mad imagery. I suspect the bulk of the "wanting something like 40K that isn't actually 40K" crowd is being pulled in that direction, further limiting the opportunities here. 

PostScript: 

If you're willing to compete with GW head to head and want to make something new why not make a 28mm skirmish game set in the Nth Succession War and have your basic units be infantry squads and individual vehicles with an occasional appearance by battlemechs? You could make basic infantry squads for each house (and merc unit and periphery bandit group) and also for each major time period (fewer bullets, more lasers as time goes on) and then make some vehicle kits as those are universal across houses. You have some interesting unit variety in the universe already with rifle infantry, laser infantry, and jump infantry and the basic trilogy of wheeled/tracked/hover vehicles plus the VTOL option. We have light medium and heavy tanks, transports, artillery, scout units, recovery vehicles, and even coolant trucks already. We have special elite units in many houses like Liao Death Commandos and the inevitable ninjas from House Kurita. Later in the timeline you get powered armor units. Battlemechs could be a limited use option like knights in 40K and would make for awesome centerpiece models in 28mm scale. 

It just seems like both a new and an obvious way to go to please existing fans while getting some attention from people playing other games that might be looking for something. Yet instead of this we get Mechs vs. Squiggoths ... 

 

Kickstarters These Days - The 2023 Report

 

In 2023 I backed 20 Kickstarters/BackerKit efforts by game companies. Some were bigger, some were smaller, but all of them were things I was interested in enough to lay some money down in advance. Most of the time it works out. In fact it almost always works out ... eventually. There are hazards however and some red flags that can inform decisions in advance. I've been doing Kickstarters since 2013 so I've seen some ups and some downs. Since it doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon I thought I would walk through these last two years and present my thoughts on how my tabletop game crowdfunding experience has gone lately. 

For 2023 here's what I backed in rough chronological order:

• Cities Without Number - Sine Nomine cyberpunk (Hardcover Book)
• Battletech Mercenaries - Their third big boxed set (Boxed Set)
• Pew Pew No Disintigrations - Fainting Goat's light RPG of space bounty hunters (Softcover Book)
• Stickman Battlegrounds - a card game of fighting stick figures (Card Game)
• Tome of Essential Horrors - OSE monster book from Necromancer Games (Hardcover Book)
• Comic Crawl Classics - superhero game based on DCC (Softcover Book)
• Tales of the Valiant - alternate 5E rules (Hardcover Book x2)
• Dolmenwood - OSR game and setting from the OSE people (Boxed Set)
• Dragonslayer - OSR game from Greg Gillespie of Barrowmaze, etc. (Hardcover Book)
• Worlds Without Number (Reprint) - Sine Nomine fantasy (Hardcover Book)
• Deadlands Night Train - An update of a classic Deadlands adventure (Boxed Set)
• MicroDungeons Halloween - a set of small 5E adventures (PDF only)
• Necessary Evil - an update to the classic campaign run through Pinnacle's "Game Changer" (Boxed Set)
• Old School Tactical Vol IV Italian Theater - An expansion for one of my favorite wargames
• Fever Swamp - An OSR big adventure (Boxed Set)
• Scientific Barbarian Magazine #6 - An ongoing supplement series for MCC (Softcover Book)
• Adventurer Conqueror King 2E - An update of an OSR game I liked a lot (Hardcover Books)
• Reaper Dungeon Dwellers - Reaper Miniatures' OSR RPG rules (Boxed Set)
• How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox - A supplement on D&D style fantasy campaign building (Softcover Book)
• Dungeon Domains Riven Catacombs - another set of small adventures (PDF only)

I included some non-RPG games in there to show how some other options have gone in comparison. Bold means I have it in hand. Italics means I do not have it yet. More on that in a minute.

First up a few things about me we can draw from this:

1. I have 7 of these that are directly related to some kind of D&D style game. Sure. That's a lot of what we play here.
2. I do tend to be more interested in new things from people I already know. Two of them are Sine Nomine, 1 Necromancer, 1 Greg Gillespie, ACKS 2E, OST v4, 2 Pinnacle, 1 from Fainting Goat, 1 from Jim Wampler for MCC - these are all things I have some version of already or companies/people I have done business with before and I am confident they will deliver. There is a risk in any crowdfunding endeavor and track record matters.
3. Some of these were fairly pricey as far as gaming items. ACKS, Dolmenwood, and OST v4 were all up there in the $200 range with 3 others in the $100 and while I get the "it's not a preorder" clause I am expecting to get something for my money - these aren't charities and I am not making a donation.

A couple of kudos:

• Kevin Crawford's Sine Nomine campaigns are the gold standard for RPG Kickstarters. he delivers on-time-every-time and the books are great games and tool kits for running a campaign in a given genre even if you use a different set of rules.  One of the ways he does this is by limiting stretch goals. His runs are typically one nice hardcover book with maybe a supplement of some kind - one supplement. No miniatures, no bags or t-shirts or mousepads, no multitude of adventures that need to be written by freelancers ... he is a one-man operation who runs focused consistently successful crowdfunding campaigns and more people running their own should look to his as an example. He is in the "I will back anything he starts up" club and that's a pretty small group for me.
• Pinnacle - the Savage Worlds people - continue to knock them out like clockwork. I admit I am not really a fan of crowdfunding almost every book they release but they do get them out consistently and without drama so they are doing a good job. I don't back everything they do because they do some licenses or genres I don't care about but if it looks interesting I am in.
• If you're interested in board wargames the Old School Tactical team (Flying Pig Games) gets these out as promised and pretty much on-time and also drama free. They make big, nice games and have several lines going from WW2 to Vietnam to ACW to an occasional foray into SF or alternate history. 

The less happy stories:

• Dolmenwood: Estimated delivery date Sept 2024. Considering it funded in Sept 2023 that was a year to get this one out. Exalted Funeral, the creator, had been doing Kickstarters for 4 years and had at least ten prior projects under their belts including Old School Essentials which is one of the big dogs of the OSR scene. So this is not a case of someone new to the process being overwhelmed by success. No, this is a case of too many add-ons. Extra books. Maps.  Dice. Miniatures. A record album. Some of the main books were described as 99.9% complete in March of 2024. They didn't even start printing the books until November of 2024. 
  
  Now sure, the PDFs have been available in draft from since early on and final - as much as an RPG PDF gets to be final - since late last year. But I didn't pay what I paid for PDFs - I paid for books and those are still not here 6 months after the projected date. 
  
  The good news is that according to the latest update they are shipping the things to the U.S. now - the containers are on their way at least. So maybe by June we will have this stuff in hand. So yes, many of those "estimated dates" are simply anchors of potential disappointment. People have to keep waiting, updates become less frequent, people get frustrated, companies start to get defensive - it's a fairly common story. This team has done a good job of keeping their cool but it has still dragged out a long time.
  
  
  

• Adventurer Conqueror King 2E: Estimated Delivery November 2024. I am not as upset with this one as shipping has begun on it and so it will not be as late as Dolmenwood. There were not a lot of add-ons here though the one obvious indulgence - a wooden slipcase at the higher pledge levels - did hit a snag late when it was cut to the wrong size. Extras that add nothing to the actual game are just a hazard waiting to be tripped. This one still took too long.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Reaper Dungeon Dwellers: Funded November 2023. Estimated delivery July 2024. That was probably way too ambitious but a) it was implied that the rules were already written in some form as they were showing beta playtest videos and b) IT'S REAPER! They do huge miniatures kick starters every year! Well even if they've gone well in the past these things can fail. Let's play Kickstarter Bingo:
• Illnesses? Check.
• Death in the family? Check.
• Facilities change? (Warehouse or factory or something)Check.
• Other obligations? (ReaperCon) Check.
• Prior Kickstarter Entanglements? (Had to finish shipping Bones 6) Check.
• Had too much material so the books got bigger? Check.
  
  The only thing missing there is "Depression" which comes up on a remarkably high number of Kickstarters. Thank goodness for that at least. 

 The March 21st, 2025 update declares the Players Book "done". That's good. Considering that July 2024 original date it really should be. 

Then it mentions work to be done on the adventure(s), the GM Book, the Monster Book, some other text they want to include ... and then they mention hoping to get it all out the door by the end of the month. March, presumably. 

At some point you need to stop digging. Stop writing new material, stop expanding the adventure, stop the proofreading cycle and ship it! 

Anyway that's probably enough for today. We can take a look at 2024 in another post. Please feel free to share your KS war stories if you're so inclined.

One of the winners!

 

 

40K Friday - The Practical Side of 3D Printing

 

He's upset about being resized

I know the dream of 3D printing is "I can print all the miniatures I want for almost free" with a side order of "any time I want them" and to a point this is true. It's more true with a resin printer than a filament printer in many ways but I am happy starting out with the melted plastic option. One of the reasons I feel that way is because I already have too damn many miniatures - what I need is more time to play them. Barring a terrible physics accident that alters the flow of time (and hopefully grants some cool superpowers) one of the areas a 3D printer can help with is the supplementary stuff that you will use -with- all of those miniatures that you already have.

One of the big ones is Terrain with a capital T. I have a lot of plastic ruined buildings - because that's kind of a 40K thing. I do not have as much Fantasy/Medieval type terrain - because those fights tend to happen more in open fields like the historical fights of the medieval era did. I don't have a lot of building type terrain that isn't "blasted Imperial gothic architecture" because that's what GW sells and what GW used to show in White Dwarf and what 3rd party makers think everyone wants based on what's in all the GW photos and artwork.  I don't have a lot of WW2-appropriate terrain. As it turns out a lot of terrain is perfectly amenable to FDM printers as the occasional layer line doesn't really get in the way or ruin the look compared to how it would impact an elf face for example. 

I have some spaceship corridors. I bought two sets of the stuff GW put out a couple of years ago for that whole Boarding Action thing they did with Kill Team and for 40K. It's cool. I can see using it for all kinds of things. I'd like more but I'm not buying another one of those sets. As it turns out there are a lot of people making those kinds of things and putting the STLs out online at very reasonable prices. 

People and companies run kickstarters for big sets of terrain and the costs there are pretty affordable with those as well. You can acquire models for an entire table's worth of whatever you like and make extras of the parts you really like at almost no additional cost once you own the files. It's great. It can work for RPGs too - if you thought the Dwarven Forge stuff was cool, well, you should see what's out there now that you can print yourself.

MiniWargaming did a Kickstarter recently for this set of interesting stuff.
"The Ruins of Drakenfell"

The other side of supplementary materials here include my personal nemesis: Base Expanders. These have been a pain for a very long time. The main culprit here is once again Games Workshop. The triggering incident is when they decide that a certain army, most of whom have been on 25mm round bases for decades, really look better on 32mm round bases. So all of the new units now come on 32's, the sure-to-be-coming-upscaled-new-versions-of-old-units will come on 32's, and random strangers whether at a store or at a con assume that all of your fully painted armies should be on 32mm bases the day after this is noticed - because they don't actually announce something like this. They just start putting new bases in all of the boxes and let people discover it on their own. 

Yeah, it's a sore spot.

You could say "but if you play with friends they probably won't care. Sure. But if I go outside the friend circle it's tricky and I also do not like to see one marine army on 25s and then my other marine army on 32s. Or mixing in Ork boyz on various differently-sized bases - that's not a good look.

Guess the main two armies this has happened to? Guess which are two armies I have tons of? Bonus if you can guess which are two of my oldest armies and thus more likely to be on 25mm bases?

Somewhere around 2017 GW started shipping new marine boxes with 32s in them. I noticed it with the new Blood Angel sets first but I don't know for sure they were the first offenders overall. Then in 2018 we got the new Primaris Marines and we all saw why they really went to 32mm bases - bigger figures need bigger bases!

Somewhat later -  it might have been earlier but I noticed it later - they decided to do this with Orks as well. Now I have a lot of marines across multiple armies but I have 120 2nd edition Goff Ork boyz in just one Ork force - so you can imagine I was not pleased to see this change. People also get a lot twitchier about orks being on smaller bases than they do marines as it means you can pack more of them into melee where they are a lot more dangerous than a tac marine.

So what does one do when one's old classic 40K figures are deemed to be on too small of a base? Well I did write a post about this a few years ago that has pictures of the base expander options I had found at that time. I have used all of those at some point but some of those were very unsatisfying as I dug into them more. The silver half-ring things gave me a lot of trouble trying to line them up straight and level. The wooden rings were definitely the cheapest and I was planning to use them on my Orks but ... I hate the way they look once they are on. The cup-style are the best looking and the least trouble in my experience but were also the most expensive. Not stupidly expensive, but when you're buying them 100 at a time you start to think about how much you are spending on stuff for your miniatures that is not actually a miniature. I had a bunch of orks, a bunch of loyalist marines, and a bunch of chaos marines that all needed this treatment. In my head, at least.

I've been trying to finish up the Goff boy updates this year and then I acquired a 3D printer ... and one night while putting the new shoes on the boyz it occurred to me that I had bought 3D printed versions on eBay - maybe I could just print them myself! As it turns out I could! You can too! I poked around various sites and found several styles of the things including some that looked pretty much like the ones I had been using. 

The tan-ish ones are the expanders I purchased a year or two back (sprayed with Zandri Dust). The black ones (and the white one) I printed myself this week. I stuck one of my Evil Sunz boyz in one to do a test fit and then printed the rest. This will save me some money, even more time, and just makes things a lot easier going forward as I don't have to worry about  buying more of them, shipping them here, or keeping some on hand for future acquisitions of old miniatures - if I need some I can print some. Case closed.

There are other practical benefits. You can print custom bases too, not just expanders! You can print objective markers and banners and nifty score-keeping things and a bunch of other stuff that you might have a use for in a particular game. Spell or area effect templates and other measuring devices seem to be a popular option. 

A lot of rank-n-flank games like Warhammer Fantasy and Kings of War use blocks of figures moving around the table. Movement trays are a way to facilitate this and have been in use for many years but before you had to make them out of plastic sheet or wood or something that took at least a little effort. Now you can just print them - do search, pick the correct size, and off you go.

The crowning jewel of this is the "Movement Tray Adapter" which combines the powers of a movement try AND a base expander into one handy option. Behold:

GW brought back old school fantasy in the form of The Old World (yay) but decided to bump all of the bases up a notch (boo) so all the old humans and elves that were on 20mm squares are now on 25s and the orcs and chaos warriors that were on 25s are now on 30s  <sigh> because that's just what they do. But, by using one of these beauties you can keep your figures on their old bases but still have them take up the correct amount of space on the table. It's a triumph of human ingenuity.

Anyway much like base expanders vs. actual miniatures, here's a 40K Friday post that's not really about 40K very much. Sometimes it's not a hobby - it's a lifestyle choice.

 

40K Friday - The Treadmill

 

I haven't posted much 40K stuff here lately because I'm kind of burned out on the game itself. Not the setting, not the novels, not even painting the miniatures. I've actually run a training game a few weeks back for some new players and probably will again soon so it's not strictly a lack of playing the game but ... man I am tired of the Edition Treadmill.

GW releases a new edition of Warhammer 40,000 every 3 years. This has been their policy for15+ years now so it's not like it is new but as a player it is relentless. Now Age of Sigmar is on the same cycle and there is a chance they pull some of their other games into the vortex as well. The Old World is too new to tell how it will go but Horus Heresy is getting a new edition this summer. It looks like it's mostly an update of the existing 40k 7th style ruleset but we won't know for sure until it gets closer. Kill Team is on a similar cycle as it just got a new edition too. 

I get why they do this - their business model depends on it. Much like RPGs releasing a new edition typically jump starts sales and is seen as an remedy when things slow down. GW gets a big income bump when a new edition of 40K is released. I'm sure AoS gives a similar, if smaller, effect. The problem for me - beyond the basic expense of doing that every three years - is that they also want to sell a new set of army books alongside that new edition. These are hardcover books and priced similarly to a typical RPG rulebook, so 50-60$ officially. A new starter box set with a rulebook and a bunch of miniatures will cost 150-200$ typically. If you only have say, two armies, you might be looking at 300-ish dollars to move to a new edition and if you just want the rulebook outside of a new box then it might only be 150-200. Now they have started selling card packs with the stats one needs to run each army and those are another 30-50 so you can certainly spend more. 

Then you get to people like me who have way too many armies. 

• Marines (multiple armies - Crimson Fists, Imperial Fists, Others)
• Blood Angels
• Dark Angels
• Black Templars
• Orks
• Eldar
• Harlequins
• Chaos Marines (Iron Warriors)
• Death Guard
• World Eaters
• Chaos Daemons
• Imperial Guard
• Dark Eldar
• Tyranids
• Necrons
• Grey Knights
• Custodes
• Tau
• Imperial Knights
• Chaos Knights

Every one of those bullet points has been a separate codex at some point though Harlies have been folded back into the Eldar book at this point and Daemons look like they are losing their standalone codex and just joining the individual chaos legion books. Just taking the list above as an example as-is I would need to buy -twenty- separate books to run all of the armies I have sitting on the shelves. That's $1000 worth of rulebooks just to play! That's not even counting buying any new miniatures for those armies or, god forbid, starting a new one! I could spend another 600+ if I wanted to get the cards for each one.

It's just untenable.

To add insult to injury some of these books won't release until the end of the edition cycle. In the past edition Imperial Guard and World Eaters released less than 6 months before the new edition came out. Which means those players spent most of the edition limping along on either old codexes that were "compatible" with the new edition - the actual functionality of this varies widely by army and by edition - or on an "Index" which released when the edition was new as a get-you-by codex. The Index stuff is usually free so there is that at least. 

Not kidding ...

On top of this GW - largely in response to the tournament scene - has started doing quarterly updates of the rules and point costs, alongside the inevitable errata that comes out following the release of each army book to fix things they left out, broke, or just want to change. That means that the rules are in a constant state of flux even during the life of edition. They constantly over-adjust and over- and under-tune the rules for various units and at the same time change the point values for multiple units so you can't even maintain a single, stable army for one edition. Sure, we'd all hate for them to just ignore some broken rules or point values for years at a time but it's become a constant state of change and I don't think anyone was asking for that either. 

At some point, knowing all of this - because most of it isn't new - we have only ourselves to blame. I'm not playing in tournaments so why should I care about these minute adjustments? If they gave out rules for every army for free in the form of an index at the beginning of the edition why should I rush to buy codexes? Well ... for this edition I decided to stop.

Part of it was the cost as it's just stupid at this point to try and keep up to date on all of them. Part of it was the realization some time back that I don't play frequently enough to get in multiple games with every army I own over the course of an edition these days. So my thinking now is to pick up a couple of the main books for me  - Space Marines, Orks, Chaos, and whichever other ones come out fairly early in the edition so I have those available but otherwise I am in no rush to spend on these things. The index rules will work just fine for the 2 or 3 games I play with most of them before the whole thing gets turned upside down again anyway. I'll just spend my time learning a few armies for Edition X and playing those and not worry too much about the others. 

So my training game was Marines vs. Orks and my next one probably will be as well. I have bought about ten army books for this edition and if someone wants to get into one of those that's cool but for the others we will likely use the index option.

This all gets compounded even more when you consider their other games follow a similar model. I have multiple Age of Sigmar armies, multiple Old Word armies, multiple Kill Teams ... I've managed to hold Blood Bowl to just the starting two from years ago so I have some sanity there at least. 

Despite my general discontent with the state of the game I am still painting  - I may finally finish the last of my old-school 1E/2E Goffs this year. I doubt that side of things will ever completely go away.

That's enough rambling. Limited activity will continue and maybe the state of things will change down the road.  

The Ups and Downs of Playing These Games for Decades

 

Well the #1 Up is that I'm still around to play them and a close second is that I have friends I have known since the 80's that I still play with regularly - that's important.

At times though the years catch up and I get to feeling a little cranky when I see something praised as a brilliant new innovation that has been around for most of those same decades. Over the past year or so one of the highlights has been "Shadowdark has you roll to cast spells"-OK? And? People constantly praise games for innovation that they didn't innovate.

I realize a lot of people came into D&D specifically and RPGs in general with 5E but c'mon: we've had "rolling to cast spells" in games for 40+ years. Fantasy Hero (85) had it, GURPS (86) had it, Shadowrun (89) had it and if you want a more D&D-descended game Dungeon Crawl Classics has had it since 2012! I don't expect every teenager who starts playing D&D to know the complete history of RPGs but you'd think that somewhere in the online discussion around this stuff there would be some ancient guardians of knowledge who would emerge and share some enlightenment but maybe there are fewer of us out there than I realized. 

So yes a downside is that very little these days seems innovative. When I read a new set of rules I can quite often start picking out where certain mechanics came from. It doesn't make a game bad - there are a lot of good mechanics out there that work very well in an RPG and deserve to see more playing time. I'm always happy to see something I liked in an earlier system make a return in a new one. 

The counterpart of this is when you see an online discussion lamenting how a game works and someone mentions how they think it could work better and, well, yeah - it used to work that way and then they changed it. For whatever reason. There was a long discussion on EN World recently about high level play in 5E D&D - mainly about how it's so uncommon - and it was mentioned that high level characters had too many options and one solution was that it would be better if lower level abilities were replaced by higher level abilities as one leveled up rather than everything being additive and just piling up. 

<sigh>

Just tell me you never played 4th edition D&D - at least not for long - as this is one of the things 4E does, Starting at 13th level you replace attack powers instead of adding them. Since the game runs up to 30th level that is starting at not even the halfway point of the leveling process and yes it does solve a lot of the "pile-up" problem. If you want to make high level play work in a D&D type game 4E did a ton of good work on that. But a lot of people decided they didn't like that version - mostly without playing any of it in my experience  - and so some of the really smart, innovative, mechanics go unnoticed 10+ years later.

I suppose one of my main points with all of this is that it's worthwhile to read other RPGs, even if you aren't running or playing them at the moment, to see how other people are doing things. You may see something that can be stolen for a game that you are running.

• Take Advantage/Disadvantage from 5E D&D. This is a tremendously useful concept for a looser/more casual RPG and gets rid of almost all of those wonderful lists of modifiers we used to see in older editions. It has shown up in a ton of games over the past decade and I think it could be used in more. Any game that has long lists of +1 for this and -1 for that ... ask yourself "do we really need that level of precision? Is it actually precision or just the illusion of that? What would we lose by taking another approach?" 
• Besides Advantage there is 4E D&Ds approach of +/-2 or +/-5 for all modifier scenarios. A lesser condition or situation = a +/-2 and a major condition or situation = +/-5 and that's it - there are no more levels to it. Limited visibility? then it's a -2. Full darkness? It's a -5. No need to refer to charts for specific modifiers - that's it. 
• Now for a bit more granularity consider mixing those two options. Minor advantages or complications = +/-2 to a roll and for a Major situation you could go to Advantage/Disadvantage. I haven't tried it this way but it might work better for some games. 

 I suppose that's an "up" - I've seen a lot of cool innovations with mechanics over the years. It's a "down" when so many newer players are unaware of them. 

• If you think rolling for spells is a cool idea try "no levels". Traveller was the first game I played that had no levels and it was pretty damn revolutionary to see it in action the first time.
• Traveller was also the first game I played with a skill system - remember early D&D did not use skills - and that was mind-blowing as well.
• In the early days Champions was the first game I played where you didn't roll for stats. Nowadays point-buy stats are pretty common but Champions with point-buy for everything - again no classes here but points for stats/skills/powers - was again revolutionary. This was also the first place I saw advantages and disadvantages for characters. This was not rolling multiple dice but could be seen today as the forerunner of Feats in D&D terms. From having a code of honor to  missing a limb to going berserk when injured it was a new way to codify a character beyond stats or skills or class abilities and make yours unique.
• The FASA Star Trek RPG was not the first but was probably the biggest game to use Action Points. Early D&D really only accounted for move, attack, or cast a spell as things you could do in a round. Champions kind of had it's own system for all of the things one could do in a round, and Snapshot was the first AP system I know of but it was a separate boardgame-type optional add-on to Traveller that not everyone had or used. Star Trek built it into the game for resolving personal combat and I loved it. Opening a door might cost 1AP, drawing a weapon 1AP, movement might be 1 AP per square, applying first aid might be multiple AP ... basically everything you could do in a round had an AP cost and every character/NPC had an AP allowance, typically based on Dexterity. it was pretty easy to adjudicate costs if something unusual came up. if you needed to arm and load a photon torpedo in the middle of a gun battle in the torpedo room maybe that's 6AP or 10AP - the GM could make a call there based on other costs and the situation. How is this relevant to today? You think Pathfinder 2E's 3 actions per round with variable action costs came from nowhere? That's a 3AP/round system in action. 

This doesn't even touch on so many other "firsts" over the years - the first dice pool systems, the first fate point mechanics giving players some control over die rolls, the first time we saw templates for characters, the first abstracted chase systems ... there are a lot of games from 30-40 years ago that have directly influenced what's popular today.

The last thing to note in my rambling notes on longevity is that over the years you will see both rules and settings show up again and again and again and something to keep in mind is that games are not technology - the newest is not always the best and a new edition is not automatically superior to what has come before. Many times you will find improvements mixed with unnecessary changes. Another thing to remember is that you don't have to play the latest and greatest version of an RPG - or any tabletop game. 

Rules-wise I started with Holmes Basic D&D. After that you get Moldvay B/X, Mentzer BECMI, the Rules Compendium if you want to count it as a separate edition from BECMI - that's 3-4 editions of a relatively simple early version of D&D in slightly more than a decade. Then we have 5-ish versions of what was AD&D. Plus Pathfinder 1E & 2E. Plus all of the OSR stuff like Labyrinth Lord and Black Hack and OSE and the rest. Plus offshoots like DCC. There are 15 versions of D&D type gaming rules just with what I have mentioned here. The companies that own them are not going to stop putting out new versions and other people are not going to stop riffing on those versions with their own versions.

Traveller has at least 5 versions of Marc Miller Traveler, a couple of Mongoose Traveller editions, plus a GURPS version or two, plus a d20 version. Roughly ten editions of Traveller. I doubt we have seen the last.

Champions has become the Hero System and we're on the 6th version of that unless you want to count the "completes" as a new edition in which case we're up to 7. Down the road I'm sure we will see another. At least these are fairly consistent and compatible with each other.

Shadowrun is a fairly niche game and we're on a 6th edition of that. You'd think something like that could settle out for a long edition run but like most games someone new comes in, wants to put their stamp on it, and decides to put out a new edition where you will no doubt see some innovations and a bunch of unneeded and likely unrequested changes that will not be playtested nearly enough leading to ridiculous levels of errata and FAQs. 

That's another takeaway from all of this time I have spent - there is never enough playtesting. Many times I expect there is near-zero playtesting based on how quickly people find broken or nonsensical things in RPG rulebooks. A designer playing with his home group is not "playtesting" at anything approaching useful levels because they are right there to explain. Let people learn it cold, straight from your draft rulebook - and I mean multiple groups - and then you're getting somewhere.

Then we get into IP games - we've seen at least 5 versions of Star Trek - Heritage, FASA, Last Unicorn, Decipher, and Modiphius and they are all dramatically different from each other. Considering FASA and Modiphius both have second editions I suppose we are up to 7 total editions.  That's a lot for one setting but Star Trek has been adding new material for most of the last 40+ years so maybe there is some need for it but I'm pretty sure you could do everything one might expect to do in a Star Trek game using FASA or Last Unicorn's rules. New aliens, new spaceships, sure - but are they really doing anything significantly different in the newer shows and movies?

With Star Wars we have 2 West End Games d6 editions, 3 WOTC d20 versions, and one (kinda) version with FFG. Again, these are radically different mechanical takes but having played them all I can say - they all work. It really comes down to personal preference for feel and what kind of support you want for a given era or type of campaign though lord knows given that it's Star Wars there is a vast array of fan-created material for all of that across all versions. 

Lord of the Rings has what, two editions with Iron Crown, a Decipher edition, and then One Ring with Cubicle 7, One Ring 2E with Free League, and a 5E sidestep edition with both? So around 7 different versions? I've never felt compelled to run a LOTR campaign but I know the people that love one of these systems really love them and often continue playing them after an edition change. I mean ... it's not like the lore changed so if edition x works for you and your players why not? 

Them there are the superhero licenses - we've had these for 40 years as well, mainly Marvel and DC, and a lot of them have been good. A few of them have been terrible so again, newness and a name brand are absolutely no guarantee of quality. I won't enumerate all of the versions here but superhero games tend to be pretty innovative when it comes to mechanics because they push all of the boundaries of a roleplaying game both physically and dramatically. If you want a universe-spanning campaign with time travel, soap opera drama, and ridiculous physical and mental powers along with all of the stupid technology and magic you can think of this is where you come. They're not all good, but a lot of them are and a lot of them are also really interesting even just to read - but if you get the chance try a few test scenarios at least, just to see what they can do.

I'm not even getting into things like Conan, Babylon 5, Ninja Turtles, Robotech, Battlestar Galactica, Call of Cthulu, James Bond, and other former or potential licensees here. There are a ton and they can get really niche-y - we're getting a new Invincible RPG I see. I wonder what it's going to do that you couldn't do in an existing superhero game? I guess we will see.

Again, and especially with licensed games, there will always be a new version sooner or later. Someone will come along and think they have unlocked the secret to making money with a property in the RPG space but I can promise you two things:

• It will have a limited lifespan. The deal only lasts so long or the licensing fees will increase and the publisher will have to let it go. Even if it's published in-house - looking at you here new Marvel RPG - the odds are that it will not make enough money to be worth the hassle and the line will be cancelled and eventually handed off to an outside team that will try to do it once again. So my advice is to just hope that it lasts long enough to crank out all of the supporting material you could possible want or need before it ends. 
• When it ends, all of those wonderful PDFs will become unavailable to buy. because of the way licensing an IP works that's just how it is. Can you buy any of the d20 Star Wars material from WOTC these days? No. They didn't really do PDFs then but a lot of their odder D&D material is available - because they own it. The MWP Marvel stuff was all available in PDF - until a little while after they announced the end of the license - and then it wasn't. SO if a new version of one of these IP games comes out and you like it then grab it as it does because it gets trickier later. 
  
  Also many times the physical books get a lot more expensive too. Not always, but quite a bit of the time it will cost more to acquire them once it's out of print than before.

Finally there are the settings. RPG companies love to reprint setting material. Presumably it sells well but also I suspect it's because most of the work is already done. All they have to do is update the timeline if it has one that has advanced - and/or update the metaplot if it has one of those - and look, here's a book that's ready to go, barring art - and they will probably reuse some of that too. Should we be upset about that? Probably not but that means you end up buying a lot of material that you already own if you stick with a game for a long time.

Take the Forgotten Realms as an example. We have had:

• An AD&D 1E box set
• An AD&D 2E box set
• A 3E hardcover book
• Two 4E hardcover books
• A 5E hardcover book ... kind of ... and then other campaign material spread across multiple adventure books ... it's messy here.

Sure, there is some timeline advancement here so there is a layer of new history and current events added on with each one, and there are usually some new edition game mechanics included as well, but a huge chunk of each of these is pretty much what you got in the prior version. 

Do you want it? Well, if you're a fan of the setting, probably.

Do you need it? Well, how much of that new stuff actually affects your campaign? Some of the mechanics, maybe. The change to which obscure god is now worshipped in Narfell? Which new continent has arisen or sunken or teleported in from a moon for this edition? The current order of battle for the Mulmaster Beholder Corps? Eh, probably not. 

But with every new edition of a game a setting update will be published. In fact, you will probably get a basic overview of the setting in the main rulebook and then a separate setting book with the full story on it. I mean, would be real new edition of  Shadowrun without a "Seattle 20xx" book incrementing the last one by 10-20 years? 

Yes this is very much like buying a movie on VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, 4K Blu-Ray, and whatever 8K or 16K comes next ignoring side trips like Laserdisc, or a digital copy. It's the same content, possibly even the same special features, as what you bought 20+ years ago with some updates that don't really change what you are watching. It may be prettier but it's unlikely to surprise you. Vader is still Luke's dad (spoiler). 

Sometimes they break things here too. A lot of people hated the 4E changes to the Forgotten Realms. A lot of people hated the Rebellion in Megatraveller splitting up the Imperium. A lot of people then hated the next edition with Traveller the New Era making the setting a sort of interstellar post-apocalyptic thing while also changing all of the rules mechanics at the same time. This did not help GDW. The GURPS version avoided it by ignoring it for one version and dropping back hundreds of years in the next. I believe Mongoose has also gone with the approach that "we are a separate timeline where none of that stuff you hated ever happened" and it seems to be working out for them.

To me it seems that the best long term solution for setting stability after the top choice of "make your own" is "pick one that you already like, pick a version of it or a time period in it that you like, and stick with that - regardless of rules changes". it will save you a lot of time and churn over the years.

Anyway that's more than enough rambling for today. I've been digging into games and systems a lot lately which spurred this epic monologue and I'm sure that drive will continue for a while longer. It's an interesting time in the hobby and it feels like changes are in the wind. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes. 

Encounter Balance in Modern D&D and Tales of the Valiant

I've never been too concerned with "encounter balance" as in most editions the guidance and numbers given for it are terrible. In my experience 4E did a pretty decent job at providing something useful but that's the only one I liked. I haven't been worrying about it much with the current game but now I feel like the group is verging on having too easy of a time with a lot of the dungeon and then suddenly ending up in a life and death struggle when they hit a certain area or combination of inhabitants. 

I'm running Temple of Elemental Evil but the characters are from Tales of the Valiant. So the old school encounter setups are somewhat offset by them having old school numbers in the party and then being characters in a post-5E system and having much greater individual power than an AD&D character, slightly balanced out by using late/post-5E monsters with more interesting capabilities as the opposition most of the time. I mean, in the end they will most likely win but I do want them to work for it. 

Given the way my players are flattening a lot of the opposition now I am paying more attention to how the various CR's in an area add up and I intend to do some tweaking for some of them - mainly the big temples as they should be some epic, memorable, fights and they should involve some actual elementals which are surprisingly sparse in some areas. Between the various monster books, some allegedly solid encounter guidelines, a big dungeon map, and the 3D printer, I can drop all kinds of elemental evil on them. But ...

What is "balance" when it comes to a dungeon-crawling D&D game? Is there a solid way to define that? How about ...

• 0 characters drop = easy encounter
• 1 character drops = challenging encounter
• 2+ characters drop = hard encounter?

I mean words and descriptors get tossed around with this stuff without any real definition but the focus on systems like this is on math. ToV's system is this for 5th to 10th levels, which is where we will be living for most of this game:

• Half of total PC levels in the party is your "Benchmark"
  (so this is 15-20 for me depending on who shows up)
• Add up total monster CR in an encounter:
• Total > Benchmark = "difficult or dangerous" encounter
• Total < Benchmark= "Less challenging" battle
  (So going by this a total CR of 10 would be easy, 15 would be average, and 20 would be challenging)
• Maximum single monster CR = average party level x 1.5
• Minimum monster CR = 1/2

Now to be fair they do mention adjusting these to better fit your own party and there is a handy chart with average level in the left-hand column going from 1-20 and the top row covering number of PCs from 3-7 and then the cross reference gives you the Challenging Benchmark. 

As far as adjusting for my game I decided to count them as one level higher due to magic items in the party and figured I would start with a 6 character party as my target. That means my Min CR is 1 and my Max CR is 9 and my Benchmark is 18. To try this out I threw two Young Green Dragons at them on the return trip from Verbobonc as that made some kind of sense for the region. That's two CR 8 critters for a 16 total. We only had 5 characters for that session  which made the Benchmark CR 15 so we were right there. 

The party knew something was up as they heard traffic on the road had dwindled over the past week.  They spotted something up in the air as they traveled and made for the ruined keep that marks the halfway point between Hommlet and the city. They determined that it was a dragon about the time they reached the keep and that's when the second dragon stepped out from behind a tower. 

The fight lasted 5 rounds which is probably fine. The fighter charged one, caught the breath weapon, then caught it again when the other one landed nearby and that was it for him - down. The wizard hit them with a Slow spell and that really reduced the melee output as it means even if they have multiattack - they do - they can only make one attack per round so instead of a claw/claw/bite they get a claw or a bite. I think the first one dropped round 3 or early round 4 and the second one was attempting to flee on round 5 when it got fireballed by the wizard (wand) and blew its save. 

Going by their method and my own method mentioned up there I'd say this was in the "challenging" ballpark. One character down, most of the party damaged in some way, they had to use at least one potent spell followed by a powerful wand ... sounds like "challenging" is a good description. 

The party mix in this case was fighter, cleric, ranger, wizard, mechanist. Typically we would have a bard and/or a paladin in there too but not this time. I have seen discussion online that having a second healer in the party really amps up the difficulty in challenging them and I do concur with that - between a full cleric, a paladin who can heal here and there, and a bard that can give out the option to use healing surges during combat they do tend to be very resilient. I will watch the specific party mix  to see if I notice any patterns developing.

I will say I do find this kind of thing fairly tedious. I lean much more towards the "natural world" kind of approach where asking around, looking for rumors, and doing research will tell you what kinds of things live in an area and then knowing that some of those are extremely dangerous will guide your decisions. The world is the world and your characters are living in it - it doesn't level up or down with them. 

If I were to take this way too seriously and actively recalculate each possible encounter every session for the number of players I had it would rapidly drain significant fun from the run. So I won't ever be doing that. These things may work alright as guidelines but don't take them too seriously. All of the math presumes that each creature has been given a CR that accurately reflects the danger they pose to a party. Given the variation one could have in a typical group I think that's optimistic at best and misleading much of the time. If everyone in the party has fire resistance then that red dragon is somewhat less threatening than if no one does. There are ranges give for things like damage output and hit points at each CR but having lived with these kinds of frameworks for 25-ish years now I remain skeptical. That said I will give it a chance, keep trying it out, and see what I find.

This did not go well for our greatsword guy

The Tales of the Valiant Temple of Elemental Evil Campaign Details

 

Well we are 22 sessions into the campaign now and the party is at 5th level. That's despite using individual per-session XP. One character is lower but he's only showing up about every third session so that's how it goes. I wanted to share some thoughts about how the game is going.

First up - how we run: We get together on Saturday nights and run about six hours. Now the first hour or so is eating and catching up so we actually play more like 4-5 hours. We play in-person, sitting around a table, moving miniatures on a battlemat when useful, typically rolling real dice. 

This campaign started in July of 2024 and while the goal is "weekly" we do have occasional skips when the DM (me) has other obligations but I've made this a priority so I keep those to a minimum. I have things 2 out of the next 3 weekends so we will likely only have two sessions in March. If a player can't make it we just play short. With 8 players though, "short" means 5 or 6 players most sessions - we almost always have one or two out - and it's very rare that we cancel a game due to lack of players. I'd say we would have to drop under 4 available to really consider that and it almost never comes up. We did have a long pause at the end of the year when I lost my dad but we've been rolling pretty steadily since then.

People ask about keeping a game going for the long term and honestly it's not that hard to find the plan: commit to running a game and stick to it. Now actually executing it can be challenging, but it has to start with that commitment from the person running the game. Individual players will miss here and there but if the GM is available then things can happen. I probably have enough on this to make a whole new post so let's leave it there for now.

As far as the system we chose for this one I am very happy with Tales of the Valiant. It feels like 5E+. My players are also very happy with it and they too feel like it's a step up from 5th in both the mechanics and what their characters can do within the framework of the rules. I have used 2014 Monster Manual monsters, new monsters from the adventure itself, a whole bunch of creatures from the Monster Vault (the ToV monster book) and a few from Kobold Press' Tome of Beasts series. It's seamless. That said I like the newer critters better as far as having interesting options before and during a fight so I use them most of the time.

For the adventure we are playing through well it's the TOEE - it's a big old-school dungeon with traps and secret doors and exploitable fragmentation amongst the enemy factions. Now are my players exploiting this division in the ranks? No ... but they could if they wanted to. Hommlet makes for a nice base area where we have had quite a bit of interaction with the locals and the wizard is planning to build a tower himself and supplant Burne as the official resident mage*. Nulb has not seen as much action but I suspect some see it as a future opportunity while others are probably looking to make it the target of some kind of war crime as a warning to the Temple, Hommlett, Verbobonc, or possibly all three - time will tell. 

One of the other fun things about this adventure is dusting off my wandering monster skills. traveling the countryside near Hommlett? Random encounter checks! Pushing through various temple dungeon levels? Random encounter checks! Taking the road to Verbobonc? Random encounter checks! It has been fun using the tables provided in the adventure and tuning them up to keep things both thematic and at least somewhat challenging. 

That leads into my one concern about the whole thing and that's that my party is very strong in a fight - and there are theoretically 8 of them. Now this is an old-school module and was not rewritten into 5E's encounter balancing numbers based on a 4-person party so it is meaner - if the old one had 8 bugbears in a room on the first dungeon level then the new one has 8 of them there as well. BUT ... they wipe the floor with most of the things they encounter unless it's a very nasty batch. They have old-school numbers with new-school power levels so it's not quite as even as I had hoped.

I did some of this to myself by giving them more access to magic items than just "what they find in the dungeon" via a traveling merchant I used to use in the old 3E Return to the Temple campaign and also by being able to go to Verbobonc to seek out magic item crafters and a bit of a market. Most of it is checking for a few random items when they seek them but ToV does have rules for crafting - as did 3E and 4E - so I want to give them some options to play in this area. Even then, the strongest items have come straight out of the adventure itself so it's not -all- my fault.

The two hairiest fights so far happened when a)they pulled the inhabitants of 4 rooms all at once by making noise at a bad time and b) the fight for the Water Temple which had multiple lighter creatures and a juggernaut fighting in melee while some clerics stayed back and cast at them. A serious fight means that usually the greatsword-wielding fighter (no shield) drops, then the paladin may or may not go down, then the ranger switches to melee and the cleric wades in with his staff of striking and the wizard and bard start pulling out the big spells like haste or fireball.

Part of the challenge here is that even though I went through beforehand and figured up all of the XP available in the adventure my party ended up going in through a side entrance and punching their way into the dungeon starting in the middle instead of starting at the top and working their way down like most people would - theoretically at least. So they were immediately in some tougher encounters than I had expected but I pulled no punches and their larger numbers helped them power through. We've had no permanent deaths though we have come close a few times.

Seeing that I began to realize that I may need to do some tweaking. Really, I started doing this from the beginning and it takes three paths:

• I started using later monster designs right from the start. These are generally better than the early 5E "bag of hit points" style monsters and have started to find their way back to 4Es ways of making things interesting. With the Monster Vault pretty much replacing the Monster Manual 1 for 1 I have a good supply of opposition.
• As they have pushed into the temple dungeon proper I am keeping in mind that this is more of an organized facility than a random set of monster lairs - noises and alarms will draw a response. One of the signature features of the temple is the competition among the 4 temples and the ways players can exploit the factionalism to avoid being overwhelmed. Well, my players do not seem concerned about being overwhelmed and are not at all concerned with infiltration or deception thus far so I'm going to play it as more of a rivalry between the elements than open conflict. That should lead to some challenging escalations as they plunge ahead.
• I have also, somewhat reluctantly, started digging into the encounter design math given for ToV. I find most of these systems terrible as they fail under scrutiny almost immediately. 3E was bad pretty much from the start, as was 5th edition. 4E's encounter design was the best in my experience but even it was not always great. An overland trip to Verbobonc gave me the chance to try it our with some wandering encounters on the road, culminating with a pair of dragons and ... I am withholding judgement for now. I want to see how it works in the dungeon environment and it really only aims at a "challenging" encounter with some guidance as to harder or easier around a calculated benchmark. I am somewhat skeptical that a thing like a dragon can be reduced down to a single numerical rating when it comes to danger factor but I will give it a try.

Bottom line we are playing regularly and consistently, my players are having fun, some memorable characters are developing, it's a classic D&D  module, and I am enjoying it quite a bit myself. I can see that it may be quite a challenge to keep things interesting for another 5 or 6 levels but I am looking at that as a positive. Barring some unforeseen complications I expect we will finish this adventure this year, probably this summer or fall. I have given some thought to what might come after but for now I am going to aim to finish this one up right.

* Of course he also refers to the other PCs as his "minions" and ranks them, offering the occasional opportunity to move up in his rankings so it is in character.