Keeping Notes

When you play tabletop roleplaying games, whether you're the player or the gamemaster, keeping notes helps remembering, especially if you've forgotten something completely, in which case written notes can tell you black on white what happened, unless your notes are crap like some of mine.

Past note keeping
In the past I didn't really keep notes. I kept adventures, written in note form, characters, and props. Years later I tried to get an overview of my home-brew world only to discover that my lack of keeping notes meant that I had a very limited idea of what actually happened so many years ago. My favorite note is "scary doctors" . There was no more or less on my piece of paper and to this day I have no idea what it means.

Current note keeping
Over the years I learned to write adventures in a more professional manner, which helps a lot in keeping track of what has happened during sessions. Furthermore I've also learned to write notes during adventures. I've tried to sometimes let other players take notes, but that sometimes poses an issue when that player forgets to take notes, takes the wrong notes, or simply isn't present.

One way I keep track of everything, and one way I've suggested in keeping notes when playing games with multiple gamemasters, is to use a 3rd party program such as Obsidian Portal. This is an easy to use website that works a bit like a wiki with all the information you want to keep.

Nina's DM'ing Anxiety

Hello everyone,

I (Nina) will soon be running my first gaming session as DM. I have actually been Dm before, but only in one on one games. So this time will be my first with multiple players.
My game will be part of our project where we switch DM every 2-4 sessions.

Im feeling rather nervous about having to DM for several people even though I know its silly. I have been playing D&D for about 8 years now but only ever had 1 person be the DM. Until we started playing this new game a few months ago.
So I dont have a whole lot of experience with different types of games since I've only ever really seen how 1 person does it.

And the game I am working on is very different. It is not so much because the story is super special or anything like that, but more that my dungoen, which is a big old castle, is filled with different encounters and traps. And these encounters are just so different than what im used to seeing as a player.
I think im mostly nervous because Im scared that the players wont find it fun or that it will be too easy for them. I find it super difficult to calculate how long it will take them to finish the adventure. I dont want them to be done after a few hours, but i also dont want it to drag out over more than 3 sessions.

I do plan on writing more about my adventure, and maybe even publish it on http://www.dmsguild.com/ , after we are done playing it.

Have any of you ever had DM-anxiety before and how did you cope with it?

I hope that you are all doing well,
hugs
Nina

Multiple Gamemasters - First Transition

Last weekend we had a gamemasters session, which is a D&D 5e tabletop RPG where we take turns being the dungeon master in the same world. We've run this project for a few months now and last weekend we switched from the first dungeon master to our second.

Background
When we set up the group we all created 1st level characters and an adventuring guild to give us a reason to stick together. We decided that each gamemaster was free to run his own game and adventure. After a 2-4 session adventure we would switch dungeon master.

When we switched last week we actually first spent a few hours finishing the last adventure. Once that adventure was done we immediately started the new adventure with the new dungeonmaster. We decided that 250 days passed ingame between the previous adventure and the new one. The new dungeonmaster introduced the new adventure by inviting our characters to a wedding in another country. On our journey, we met another member of our order and decided to help him on his quest, which introduced the character of the gamemaster who was the dungeonmaster in our previous adventure. The transition was quick and flawless.

What was different
The first difference I noticed was the environment. We went from a temperate medieval kingdom to an arabian style desert environment.

A second difference was that the new quest was more personal while the previous adventure was tied to our adventuring guild.

A third difference was that the second dungeonmaster had a lot of puzzles and mind games, while the previous dungeonmaster was more focused on mystery and investigation.

A fourth difference was something I had dreaded, which was differences in rules. We had agreed to use the rules as described in the core rulebooks, but our first dungeonmaster often didn't have a proper grasp of the rules and thus made a few mistakes. Our second dungeonmaster didn't know the rules all that well either, so some of the rules were different from our first dungeonmaster and some rules were completely overseen. This may not usually be an issue, but I noticed that our bloodhound character is very broken already since he had created a character using one set of rules, levelled it up using another set, and is now running an adventure with a third set of rules. Hopefully this will get sorted as we play more.


What was the same 
I was afraid that each gamemaster would run the adventuring guild differently, but so far both gamemasters have run it the same way.

We're playing with the same characters, and they haven't changed. I may look into our bloodhound character when I'm the gamemaster to see if he needs to be fixed, but so far he's just as broken as he was in the previous adventure, which is a pity.

I missed the combat scenes in the last session, but I believe these were also very identical to our previous adventure.

Factions & Renown - Creating an Adventurers' Guild

To ensure in-game collaboration throughout the entire project, we decided to create an adventurers' guild for our gamemasters campaign where we take turns being the dungeonmaster. We started out simple by simply having a concept that would tie us together, but as the game progresses it has occurred to me that we should expand on the guild.


Name
Initially we came up with an abundance of names for the guild (you can see the list at the end of the blog). To choose the name we decided to hold a vote. One person abstained, and the name of the guild became "The Order of the Black Phoenix" with 60% of the votes.


Logo
A few suggestions to the logo has been created but so far the closest we have gotten is a vague description of the logo, which will be added to the blog at a later date.


Contracts
Every in-game member of the order signs a contract to the order. It has been suggested that there are two different contracts that work differently. The details of each contract still hasn't been worked out and will be added to the blog at a later date.


Rules
We haven't really looked at the rules for the order. The whole point of the order is to tie together different characters in-game and give a reason why we're playing together. I have therefore compiled the first three rules. There was a fourth rule about stealing, but it was vetoed by the group.

1. Every party member must be part of The Order of the Black Phoenix to participate in the campaign.

2. Every player gets a vote. Usually a decision will have to be unanimous, but when a decision must be made it is the majority that decides.

3. Any in-game member of The Order of the Black Phoenix who physically harms another member is automatically thrown out of the order. This is done out-game so the question of proof in-game doesn't matter.


Ranks
We voted unanimously about using renown in the game as part of The Order of the Black Phoenix. Although we've agreed to use the renown variant rules as described on page 22 of the Dungeon Master's Guide, we haven't created ranks or benefits. Here's my personal suggestion on ranks.

0 Renown: Novice
1-2 Renown: Mercenary
3-9 Renown: Adventurer
10-24 Renown: Hero
25-49 Renown: Master
50+ Renown: Grandmaster


Renown 
The rules state that you earn renown by completing missions or quests that serve the order's interest. You gain 1-2 renown at the same time that you are awarded experience points. If you want, you can create additional requirements to earn a promotion within the order, but currently we have no additional prerequisites.

One of the obvious rewards of renown is that if you have a higher renown than another member of the order, then you also deserves a higher respect. If this is between a PC and a NPC, then the lower ranked NPC is more likely to hear out the characters.

The most interesting rewards of renown are perks and haven't been created yet. This could be anything from contacts, adventure hooks, safe houses, merchants, trade discounts, followers, access to potions and scrolls, favors, ability to call for backup or a small army, take custody of a magicla item, access to a helpful spellcaster, or access to special missions only available to high ranking members of the order. These perks will be added on this blog at a later date.

A last note is that it probably should be possible to gain additional renown between adventures as part of a downtime activity, as described in chapter 6 of the Dungeon Master's Guide.


List of names
Fellowship of Exodas
Knights of the Guild
Order of the Blue Flame
Silver Team
Team Midgaard
Team Unicorns of Awesome
The Battered Door (Adventurers' Guild)
The Black Griffon (Adventurer's Guild)
The Black Network
The Companions
The Crownward (Adventurer's Guild)
The Golden Gauntlet (Adventurer's Guild)
The Iron Giant (Adventurer's Guild)
The Order of the Black Phoenix
The Red Dragon (Adventurers' Guild)
The Silver Seal (Adventurer's Guild)

Elemental Evil Mini Adventures

If you've been following this blog, then you will have heard about my current 3.5 D&D campaign that I started 9 years ago. We are planning on resuming the 5th party to run the campaign here in June and I'm therefore working on the adventures themselves.

3.5 D&D
Due to holidays I fell behind on the adventure for my 3.5 campaign. I also fell behind on my blog posts, which is why I'm posting blogs every other day at the moment. In order for me to catch up, I'll need to double my work, which is easier done than said. I simply use my 3.5 games for the 5e adventures I had planned on creating for the DMsguild.

According to my plan, I should have been done with the "Elemental Corruptions" part of the adventure, which is the main part of the 11th level section of the adventure, which covers the players' attempt and foiling Ithilba's political corruption across the continent of Aspenta. I've created the outline for the adventures and the first one, but the rest have fallen behind schedule. Starting on monday, I should actually begin working on NPC descriptions and "Elemental Skirmishes", which is the part of the adventure that focuses on mass combat throughout the campaign.


5e version
Instead of pushing myself, I've planned to combine my 5e adventures that I am going to publish on DMsguild with my 3.5 game. This is done by creating mini adventures set in the Elemental Evil campaign, and adding a section in each adventure describing how to change the adventure to fit into the Elemental War campaign (which is my current 3.5 campaign set in my homebrew world of Aspenta). To make it even easier, I simply add the detailed NPCs in the appropriate adventures. This means I have until Easter to write and publish 6 adventures, which includes a mass combat adventure that covers 8 large battles.

Future mini adventures 

1. The first adventure I'm writing will have the players investigate the death of an elven prince only to discover that the assassins are actually elementals.
2. The second adventure will have the players fight their way through a squad of air elementals led by fog giants in an attempt to gather proof that they are about to betray a halfling city.
3. The third adventure is a three-way political adventure that pits three human lords against one another. The players eventually discover that the lords were framed by elementals, who was trying to get the lords to fight each other.
4. The fourth adventure is a dwarven adventure where the players will have to overcome the greed of a noble dwarven house and convince them who the real enemy is.
5. The fifth adventure takes place in a magical realm where forgeries, illusions, charms, etc has taken hold of the government. The players will need to fight their way through the deceptions in order to save the government from an approaching elemental force.
6. The last adventure will cover 8 battles between the players and the elementals. The adventure will cover the rules used, the standard strategies and potential battlefields for each battle, stats on enemies and friends, and how to actually run the battles and what consequences they have in the long run.

Bard Archetypes

The Player's Handbook has two bard archetypes, the College of Lore and College of Valor. Wizards of the Coast has written two more archetypes in their Unearthed Arcana called the College of Swords and the College of Satire. All of these colleges are great at showing how bard archetypes work and how to create your own. A number of people have therefore done this and uploaded their own bard archetypes to DMsguild. Since I'm currently playing a bard and thinking about creating my own bard archetype that fits my character more than any other archetypes I've found so far, I downloaded 7 bard archetypes I could find. I then reviewed all of them so that I have an idea of how to create my own archetypes.

Score
The reviews I've written on DMsguild focus on 5 different aspects: visual design, grammar, concept, rules, and balance. I've taken the two archetypes from the Player's Handbook as a reference. They have a beautiful visual design with artwork, the sentence construction and word use is flawless, the concepts are innovative since they are the first of their kind, and the rules are both new, fresh, and balanced especially since they have been playtested.

Archetypes
The archetypes I found on DMsguild include the College of Cooking, College of Hymns, College of Mourning, College of Diplomacy, College of Animalism, College of Dilittante, and the College of Bladesinger. If you want to read my reviews, you can check them out on DMsguild.

The visual designs of the various archetypes varied a great deal. Some were simplistic with nothing more than black words on white paper, while others were beautiful with custom fonts, background colours, and artwork. My favourite was the College of Bladesinger, which had fantastic artwork, something I would never be able to duplicate.

Most of the archetypes were properly written except for the College of Cooking, which had many mistakes. Someone else had already reviewed the college and noted that there were spelling and grammar mistakes, but I still added the same point in my own review.

There were bad concepts, good concepts, and unoriginal concepts. The College of Dilittante and Animalism were extremely strange concepts which I scored very low. The College of Bladesinger didn't score very high either since the Bladesinger isn't a new concept, besides it probably doesn't fit very well with the bard class. The highest scoring concepts were the College of Hymns and the College of Mourning, which were bards focused on life and undeath, concepts which were very interesting.

Most of the rules presented in the various colleges were innovative. Unfortunately many of the archetypes didn't follow the same pattern as those created by Wizards of the Coast. In other words, people created bard archetypes that were vastly different from the basic rules. This included bards that didn't get to use their Bardic Inspiration for anything, bards that simply gained multiclass features, or bards that gained 2-3 features at one level. My favourite was the College of Mourning, which had completely innovative rules not seen anywhere else while still using the basic bard archetype pattern.

I didn't playtest any of the bard archetypes and I'm not sure the creators have either. Some of them seemed like they had been created on the fly, some of them even rushed such as the College of Dilittante. The best archetype was the College of Hymns. Though I haven't tested this archetype myself, it seems very balanced compared to the other colleges, although other reviews scored it very low.

In conclusion, the College of Hymns and College of Mourning were my favourite bard archetypes I could find on DMsguild.

My own creation 
Now the time has come for me to create my own archetype. The character I have created is a bard character that focuses on lies, disguises, and illusions. He's very similar to a bard of the College of Satire, but he is focused on what's below the surface and not on the idea that the bard is a jester. The four features I need to create to follow the standard bard archetype pattern are as following:

At 3rd level he should gain some type of proficiency bonus. I'm thinking that he should gain proficiency and expertise in the Deception skill.

At 3rd level he should gain some type of feature that uses Bardic Inspiration as a resource. I'm thinking about some type of self-bonuses, like the ones that the College of Swords have. This is because I don't understand why a deceiving bard should use his resources on the other players, wouldn't he just use it on himself?

At 6th level he should gain some kind of extra action feature. I'm thinking about stealing a rule concept from the College of Diplomacy as I did with the bonus proficiency concept (I know, I'm not very original). The College of Diplomacy gives the ability to conceal certain components when casting spells. I'm thinking about adding this feature to illusions spells.

At 14th level he should gain some type of feature that either uses Bardic Inspiration or grants some kind of extra action. I haven't thought of one yet, but revieweing the other archetypes, I'm thinking some type of feature that mixes a rogues' abilities with an illusionists'.

Once my first draft is completed I'll run it by our group. I will surely get some feedback and make changes. Then it'll be time to playtest it and make additional changes. Finally, when the archetype is completely finished, I'll upload it to DMsguild.

Valentine Love Adventure

Valentine's Day is only 1 week away, a celebration of romantic love, an event in most lives evne if you don't celebrate it. My wife likes to make adventures for events such as Christmas, Halloween, and such. Therefore she came up with an adventure for Valentine's Day, an adventure I've written and called Valentine Love Adventure, which you can find on DMsguild.

The Idea
My wife started talking about creating a one-on-one D&D 5e adventure based on Valentine's Day. It would have dragons in love where one of the dragons were captured and brought into a dungeon. The party would have to venture into the dungeon to save the dragon. The adventure would then end with the two dragons reuniting in love, one of them would propose, and there would be a dragon wedding with unicorns and glitter and all that stuff. I took the idea and wrote an actual adventure.

The Adventure
The beginning and end of the adventure is based exactly on how my wife described it (I forgot the glitter though), and then I simply created a dungeon where the party could go and save the dragon. D&D is not specifically a one-on-one game, and I therefore created two versions, one where the DM could play with one other person, and one where couples could play together.

The adventure had to be short as it's meant to be played on Valentine's Day, and people may want to do other things than spend all day playing D&D. I therefore tried to create an adventure that should only take 1-4 hours to play through. Since the game is also intended as an introductory game for new players (your spouse may want to allow you to introduce him/her to D&D on Valentine's Day as a treat), then the game should also be easy to get into, which is why it's been designed for 1st level characters.

I created a goblin cave with a variety of chambers. I reduced the amount of goblins by having them fight another goblin tribe prior to the adventure and having taken losses from capturing the fairy dragon. I added a choice in the dungeon in the form of several passages, meaning that the party would only need to go through 3 of the 4 encounters to complete the adventure.

Each of the 3 encounters would have a Valentine aspect (also the name of the goblin boss) in the form of flowers, gifts, and chocolates. I added "Valentine Special" sections to help DMs remember to purchase real flowers, gifts, and chocolates that they can then hand out during the 1-4 hour gaming session to make the day more romantic.

The Point 
The point of the adventure was to create a D&D adventure with a Valentine's Day theme. It is meant to be used between loved ones and to add romance on a day of love. The point is that the adventure can be used to introduce D&D to new players, or to add some romance to a one-on-one game between two TRPG players. The end can even be modified so that the DM says romantic things specifically to the player. Hopefully, this adventure will show the community that D&D can be used for a large variety of things, including as a Valentine's Day event.