Music.

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to Morris' unofficial tabletop RPG talk.

I am Russ, aka Morris, or Morris, aka Russ, and with me this week is...

DJ Coffee from the Southampton Guild of Rollplayers, also from Homebrew and Hacking, TTRPG Design.

Russ, Jess, however, I am delighted to be here.

And with that I have spoiled my introduction But I don't care because I can do it anyway, Because joining us all the way from the darkest bowels The dark satanic mills of the depths of E.M.

Publishing It is the overlady of the hard-working minions that you haven't found there It's the one, it's the only It's me, Jessica, from E.M.

Publishing I thought you were just talking about the area I live in So, yeah, Eastleigh is...

Eastleigh, yeah.

Although I'm not entirely sure I agree with that characterisation of the end publishing, quite frankly.

It's a bright and airy place, is the end publishing.

There are no dark satanic mills here.

Good to be queen, I hear.

Okay, good to be queen.

Very well.

How are we all?

Ready for another day, another week of TTRPG news?

Yes, although we are in that between-convention lull.

So Gen Con has happened, but Essen and other big conventions are kind of not quite launched yet.

So people are kind of hoarding their release information like dragons with treasure.

But nevertheless, we have stuff.

We've got stuff.

We have stuff.

We have stuff.

Never fear.

I scoured the internet.

Indeed.

All of the internet.

I found some stuff for us to talk about.

You don't go scouring the internet, Russ.

It's very bad for you.

That's a bad idea, isn't it?

You should use gentle, non-abrasive polish.

Yeah, yeah.

Otherwise, you might have a bath in your hands.

Yes, yeah.

And you never know what you'll find when you scour the internet.

It's a dangerous place, is that there, internet.

Well, I have found some, like, fairly interesting kickstarters.

Apparently, I'm the only one who's looked.

So, it's going to be an interesting show this week.

So, as long as you like listening to the sound of my voice.

If you don't.

Yeah, well, we've got some news to get to first.

First, and then you can do a nice big Kickstarter segment.

So let's start off with D&D, as we often do, because D&D is going to that there Plano and or Plano, Texas.

Plano?

Plano?

Does anybody know?

Somebody probably does, but I do not.

On October the 15th.

Wonderful, if you live there.

Yeah, so that was that immersive quest thing that started in Toronto.

And it's got that big...

Explain the web address.

Yeah, it has that great big life-size beholder that has someone standing inside it to make, I guess, the tentacles wiggle and the mouth move.

I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.

Well, we announced that job posting.

I remember it was like, if you can carry this much weight and stand for this number of hours, this is the job for you.

So grant at bsp and tells me that it is a long a sound so it's, no texas thanks for the clarification and i'm going to guess it's dnd immersive.com as opposed to the end immersive or divisive which i was like what is that word and then i realized that's dmd immersive.com yes so this is a 60 minute live experience yeah um there's multimedia stations immersive theater cinematic video a marketplace and a restaurant which will be my favorite bit featuring themed food and beverages i love food and beverages i love food yes i have a food and beverage every day it sounds a bit like an escape room meets a bar.

Yeah, kind of.

I don't know how much it's just passive watching and how much it's active doing.

It reminds me of Secret Cinema, if you've ever been to one of those.

They create a world and you get to walk around and look at things.

So a bit like a theme park, maybe.

Someone on EAN World did actually go to the Toronto one and posted a rundown.

Nice.

So this is what they said.

So lighthearted and fun way.

This, by the way, was Panic on EAN World.

and this was posted in December 2024 when it was in Toronto.

Okay.

A light-hearted and fun way to spend a few hours.

Was it impressive and amazing?

Not really.

Was it super innovative and offered excellent gaming?

Also not really.

Was it a bit cheesy?

Heck yes.

So pure G&D on that point.

Does it feel like it was made by those who have a love for the game?

Yes, indeed.

Okay.

I think that's what I'd expect.

People are really passionate about it, but it is a bit cheesy because it's going to have lots of nods to the classic D&D things in a very uh-uh sort of way.

Yeah.

But I didn't get the impression that it was a gaming event.

I didn't think I'm going to sit down and do a run.

I've got a description here of the actual experience but it's quite long so if I try and whip through this really quickly and just paraphrase it as I read it.

If you don't want spoilers you're going to go.

Skip out for a minute.

Yes, this is spoilery.

Skip forward about five minutes if you don't want them.

Alright, no, Oh, I won't do it, actually.

No, no spoilers.

I'll put a link in the show notes instead.

If you want to know, go and follow the link to the show notes.

That's a better way to do it, I think.

Stay here, then.

Don't go anywhere.

See you later.

He says, Who taught you phonics?

LOL.

Nobody taught me phonics.

LOL.

So, thus predates the teaching of phonics.

Yes, yes, yes.

So, anyway, D&D, the immersive quest, heading to Texas, starting on October the 15th.

It costs $35.

$35 for a few hours entertainment.

In fact, I think teaching phonics might actually be an American thing.

I don't know.

Were you taught phonics at school, Jessica?

No.

Me neither.

It's those things where you get a couple of little lines with a thing in between them.

And I see those on Wikipedia articles on how to pronounce something.

I look at it and I'm like, what?

It's like hieroglyphics, isn't it?

I don't know what that is.

Never been taught that in my life.

But in some languages.

I would never have guessed.

In English, you do need them.

But in other languages, like in Welsh, you don't need it because everything you just say, how it's written.

So if you've seen a word that you've never heard and you will know how to pronounce it from reading it because all the sounds are consistent.

It's not like in English where...

It's Spanish like that too.

I don't speak Spanish, so I wouldn't know.

I did not know that about Welsh though, so thank you for sharing.

But English, there was a great linguistic shift.

There were people doing dictionaries.

I'm supposed to be fair.

Probably a good third of the words in English are not pronounced the way of it.

We're looking at you canigate canigatee canigatee yes which is nowadays night with a K, it's a challenging language to read dyslexic in I tell you stand up comment I can't remember who did a bit on what if all the silent letters were actually out loud.

And it was hilarious.

I'm fairly sure Plinkett was in there.

I think Q is an interesting word as well.

Because you really just need the one letter.

Q, the Q, and then a load of silent letters.

Really?

Yeah, they formed a Q beside it.

It's a very British word.

Anyway, back to the top RPG news.

Do we have more D&D news?

No one told us for next.

Yes, do we have more D&D news?

We have more D&D news.

We've got a look at Heroes of the Borderlands.

So Heroes of the Borderlands is the D&D starter set that's coming later this month.

When I say later this month, it's literally next week, I think, the 16th?

Is that next week or the week after?

It's soon, anyway.

Week after.

We've had a lot of media hype around this.

They've had loads of previews for a really long time because I think for about six months I've been hearing about this starter set.

Yeah, they've been pushing it hard.

But what we've got is a really close-up look of the character boards or the class boards.

Yes.

so if you recall the setup is basically you get a board for each class and then you place cards onto that board in order to customize it so this is the cleric board and obviously jessica i imagine you also are feeling that this looks exactly like a player aid in a board game yes it does and i think that's really clever it feels very accessible it yeah it feels easy to use i really i like it i This is quite innovative.

I know D&D aren't the only people doing this.

There are other RPGs that I've seen do this as well.

And my mind is blanking at the name.

So please scream at me on the internet if you know which ones those are.

But I really like this as a thing that's appearing in the industry.

Yeah.

It's definitely inspired by board games, without a doubt.

Although I would say sort of FFG's Warhammer Fantasy roleplay was very much like this as well.

And of course, Daggerheart's a little bit like this too.

So I guess, you know, it's not original, but it's a welcome addition if you look on that there's some interesting things you can see you can see there's no ability scores on there so you've got a cleric board yes on the left you've got the ability modifiers but not the scores and.

Then you've got slots where you place various things.

You can put your armor in that slot, and you can put your spells and your equipment in this slot.

And over on the right, you can put your background and your species.

And all this builds your character on this board.

Can I just say, by the way, I'm looking at this, I'm actually quite irritated.

Oh, dear.

Oh, no, disgust.

That's not my view.

Well, indeed.

But that's because I don't think that you should give bad pregens to players.

I think that has a designer you should give good pre-gens to players so that they their mistakes can be their own as opposed to being let down by your shoddy mechanical choices.

What are you seeing here that's bad i haven't looked into it in detail well you know exactly what this problem is if i say it's the shadow heart problem because shadow heart in border's gate 3 she starts off with dumping decks with a negative penalty in it and she's got minus one and she starts off with a chain shirt.

A chain shirt adds your dexterity mod, or in this case, subtracts it from your armor class.

So you've got a cleric starting off with AC12, which is quite frankly appalling and just means that if anyone looks at you, they're probably going to hit and you will be stabbed by goblins just every time.

Armor class 9, starting card, chain set.

If it was like...

This would look like if you add some cards to it.

Look, there we go.

Yeah, there you go.

13 plus dex mod okay so 13 minus 1 is 12 and they've got a strength of plus 2 which means they would definitely be able to wear like a chainmail shirt and not a chainmail shirt a.

Chainmail sorry which would give them a c16 and it's like why if you know you've got a low dex would you go with a chain shirt this is a terrible plan for you that's a good point that's a good point yeah i guess giving them minuses, It seems bad.

It seems bad.

It's like, you know, you've taken on a course.

That just happened, it looks like, to be the piece of equipment that that pre-gen chose.

They could have chosen a different item.

Because there's cards for different things.

So just because they've used a change here doesn't mean that the player might not have taken a different piece of equipment.

I mean, it's a pre-gen.

They're not going to know better.

You just play with what you've got.

I mean, I think the design of this as well, it very much gives you the information you need.

Like you say, it's just the modifiers there.

You don't see the maths behind it.

So this start set really just gets you in and playing.

It's not going to teach you how to build it, what's the mechanics behind the scenes.

And that's not what it's trying to do.

But I think that does speak to PJ's point.

Because they don't have the levers behind the scenes to pull, they're not going to know, oh, actually, if I just tweaked this, then I would have a better outcome with this.

So I do see the point you're making, PJ.

It's giving them a disadvantage that they're not in a position to really mitigate.

Yeah.

And also, it's like you're going to encourage people when they hit level four to put points into decks, which you can do.

That's not the worst possible choice in all worlds to make.

But like, you know, you're a cleric.

You should probably be putting it into wisdom so your spells are more effective and it does a lot for you.

Whereas here, you're like, well, I've been suffering with my low armor class.

On my t-shirt.

And it's just like, you don't have to do this to your players.

You could be nice to your players, is what I'm saying.

Aside from that, if we have a look at this thing, it's quite interesting.

So hit points are tokens, if you can see there.

Yes.

Your little hearts to represent your hit points.

Absolutely.

It's a decent way to do it.

Yeah.

You've got a card there representing your current weapon, which has the stats for that weapon on it and tells you what to roll, which is quite nice.

You have your spell, your blessed spell is on there as a card.

And then over on the right, we've got dwarf and acolyte, which is their background and their species.

I assume on the back of those cards, it presumably has a list of the dwarf traits and on the back of the acolyte, it has a list of whatever's relevant there too.

Because of course, a dwarf, right, does not have a penalty for having heavy armor that they don't have the strength score.

So this further adds to my irritation.

It's just like, I don't know, as part of it, it's just like, they could be a dwarf, they could have dumped strength and had a chain shirt and they wouldn't have had any penalties still.

And they could have had a better deck.

We could have meant a better initiative modifier.

It's just...

We get it, Dino, we get it.

Ah!

Okay.

Like, I don't know who is saying that, but this is really, really annoying me how it's set already.

Yeah, I can see.

I can see.

Why did you have to pick the cleric as the example, Russ, though?

Well, he didn't pick the cleric.

Russ didn't pick the cleric.

Will the co-host have picked this to annoy me?

It's like, there's a choice.

Specifically you.

They're like, that PJ.

That was the preview they provided.

I don't have a preview of another class.

Oh, really?

Okay.

Yeah, and they totally haven't dumped Constitution.

Like, a plus zero modifier will be absolutely fine when you're doing Constitution, Jax.

This is like a great build, the thing to be said against that.

Anyway, moving on.

When you hit level two, you flip the card over.

This is kind of cool.

Yeah.

And then when you get to level three, you swap your class board for a more specialized one.

Exciting.

Because you've got more stuff going on.

Yeah.

So here we go.

This is the next stage of the character.

Got a breastplate now, look.

See?

Got a breastplate now.

Which, instead of having 14, has AC 13.

So you're making players look one from their armour every single time.

Give this dwarf a shield!

So the class board then has at level 3 a more specialised board which includes your subclass.

Yes.

In the box set, this one would include boards for either the life or the light domains in the starter box set and we're looking for those of you at home at the life cleric which just reminds you means that whenever you cast a spell that helps a creature gain hit points they gain additional hit points equal to two plus the spells level which is not to be sneezed at that's pretty sweet and obviously they'll be needing to cast it on themselves because they'll be losing more hit points unless they've got such a stinky armor class Bah Bah I say Bah.

Why didn't you mention this before PJ?

Yeah I don't know I bit my lip I tried to soldier through But yet here we are Mm Yeah, Anyway, so other than the Xtervity score and the armor class, what do we think of this setup?

I think a lot of it looks really cool.

I really like the artwork I'm seeing.

A character wearing glasses.

Unusual.

Nice.

She's black.

No beard, but you know, you can't have everything.

And has a ginger cat with her.

So, you know, that's like the artwork almost makes up for my dislike of the dumping dexterity and constitution.

Sorry, you don't like the Sorry, what do you mean?

Could you explain?

No, stop.

I regret saying it.

I didn't play mine.

Oh, Russ, you know I'm going to actually tell you.

Character build aside.

I like it.

It feels very accessible for somebody new to play.

It feels like you can sit down and just kind of get going.

And it will create a different experience.

Because I quite enjoy when I'm learning a new role-playing game, I'm having a session zero where we all sit around with our pens and papers and build stuff because I'm kind of learning the mechanics and how things work as we build for a session.

But I appreciate not everyone enjoys that, wants to do that, and also doesn't have the time.

Like maybe if you're just at a convention, you're like, hey, let's sit down and play this.

So it feels ideally suited to what it's trying to do.

And also, it seems clever from a business perspective because if people start playing this way and get used to it, they're going to be very reliant on D&D beyond.

I would also say, and this may shock both of you, but you know what?

A lot of people, when they come to roleplay, come for the stories.

They don't come for the homework.

Yeah, no, I know.

I know.

I'm totally that person.

I've often said, I pick my roleplaying games based on the story and what we're doing more than the system.

Yeah.

I can make any system work, really.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, that's largely true.

You can.

it's just like um sitting and doing character generation does it take a good two minutes like i played barbarians for lemuria the other day someone else was running for me it was great it's very easy to play character very quick you just make a couple of decisions and you can start playing you can do a whole adventure in like a three-hour slot dnd you're going when you know what you're doing you're still looking at about 20 minutes yeah at least um you could spend much longer i remind that some people do like do enjoy that process though there are people on dnd beyond who just make loads of characters because they like doing that they're never going to use them you know they make 20 characters just to make these builds and experiment with them and tweak them and things like that just to see what they can do i do like doing that as well like and i that's how i saw someone had been tweaking with it and made this combat medic build so it was a rogue who was a medic and i was like this is really cool is it the most optimized thing no but it's fun and it works so i've played that for a campaign yeah but it's not anti-synergistic by which i.

Mean you're not like dumping dexterity to play this rogue oh no it works it works on fast hands and yeah yeah exactly it's like you know it's like it's thematic it's flavorful like is it the absolute best for all situations probably not but you know what i i've had i've had fun with a run for into laster where a rogue who just runs around and says oh healing potion for you healing potion for you and yeah that's fun.

I do wonder with this setup how extendable it is, because these only go up to, I think, level three, or maybe level four.

I don't think it is varied, because there's too many variances in different character classes, character subclasses.

And you're talking a board per character level per class, because each class, as you see here, they've got a board for level one cleric, a board for level two cleric.

So each class, if you wanted to extend it, you've got 13 classes times 20 levels times, say, three subclasses.

That's how many boards you need.

What's that?

13 times 20 is 260 times three is...

Yeah, you're up to like 750 boards you need.

Yeah.

So it's not extendable.

I don't think the intention is to replace it for longer term campaigns.

I think this is a just get playing, get them hooked.

This is the first one's three kids.

And then you go on to D&D Beyond because you look at the paper character sheet and you're like, what is this garbage?

Yeah.

I understand.

Yeah.

And I imagine this setup, when you're 20th level, would involve so much stuff, so many cards and tokens and chips and counters.

Everyone would need their own desk.

Like the big, you know, like when you play Magic the Gathering and you have a rollout mat, you'd need like two of them.

To roll out neoprene mats with all your, especially if you're a spellcaster or something.

That was the problem I had with Fantasy Flight Games' Warhammer, though, because that was very much like this.

It was very much card and token-based, your character, all laid out in front of you.

And there was so much stuff.

It was just a mess.

And everything, you kept knocking things, and things got mixed up with the person next to you.

And, you know, it was just too much stuff.

Like big fan of fantasy flight games but the very valid and fair criticism that always pointed at them and maybe that's changed in recent years i don't know is that they clearly have stakes in the cardboard manufacturing factory because my goodness they have far too many tokens so i i think there is a middle ground we don't have quite so many tokens um but yeah like dnd like this is a good way to get it started but you know one thing that you could take through is i really like having those hearts for health tokens and they have numbers on like five tens and ones because i don't like doing maths and i like the idea of having them on my board to just like, yeah i quite like the idea of that i yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna take a pun right and say that you have a board game which has a bunch of little hearts in yeah i don't know what that board game Oh, I do.

I only have about some other region of 70 to 90 board games currently, but I'm sure one of them will.

Yeah yeah like i'm fairly sure i'm fairly sure that gold pieces work the same as well i think you've got tokens for gold pieces as well in this i'll have something you'll need the digits because like you can't have all them being one hit point because by the time you know you're level 10 you'll be like ah you got five hit points we can see on this ball yeah that's what i mean so if you have like fives tens ones and stuff you could yeah yeah that's interesting that might be something I'd consider for future games because I dislike doing maths.

But anyway, I'm interested in the new D&D starter set.

I'm not the person that's going to buy it, but I think it's a really good idea, and I wonder, I think it will be helpful to get new people into the game.

Yeah, yeah.

It's not cheap, though.

How much?

A starter set's gone.

I mean, I think it's worth it.

Don't get me wrong.

But it is $49.99, but you get a lot of stuff in it.

It's not like the old starter sets, which are kind of pretty much an empty box with a debits of paper in them.

These are crammed from the stuff.

I wrote a little, and that's a little better, but yeah.

Mildly hyperbolic, shall we say.

Yeah, and this is for the whole table, so one person would buy it, and it's not like everyone needs to buy one of these.

I can see it being useful at role-playing clubs, schools, conventions, things like that.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, September the 16th, So in a couple of weeks, it comes out $49.99.

So you can pick it up then.

That's marvellous.

Exciting times.

Yeah.

Right then.

Pathfinder.

So last week, I think it was, we mentioned that Pathfinder was switching to a quarterly Adventure Path format.

Yes.

So there's the previous monthly magazines, yeah?

Yeah.

So I thought we'd have a quick look at what the first one is.

Ooh.

Let's have a mooch.

And that is Hellbreaker's Adventure Path.

Hellfire crisis.

Yeah.

I'm already...

This is coming in March 2026.

I already feel stressed.

It's got Sen in it.

Sen HHS, who works on the blood.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah.

So 256 pages.

This will take you from levels 1 to 10.

It will cost you $79.99.

A lot of people are saying that's a lot for a hardcover book.

But as we said last week, if you bought the original format, the soft covers of the Adventure Path, that format, it would cost you an extra $10.

It would cost you $89.99.

So you're actually saving $10 and saving quite a lot of shipping because you're only getting one shipment other than...

Are you paying for it?

Sorry.

The one thing I was going to say is I also think this is kind of what role-playing books should cost.

I know this, maybe this is a controversial thing, but creating games, especially Pathfinder, they have really, the adventures are really good quality.

So they have some great people working on it, writing it, the artwork, look how beautiful that is.

You know, there's a lot that goes into developing a book.

I know when people buy a role-playing book, they think of the cost of printing the thing.

But the cost of printing the thing is generally the cheapest part of the process.

Anyway, that's just my little rant.

Yeah.

I mean, there's a reason I've said many times, you know, that's why 90% of the TTPRPG creator industry is working for lesser minimum wage.

Yeah.

Because you can't actually sell the products for what they're actually worth, given the amount of work that goes into them.

Unless you're at Wizards of the Coast print run sale, because then obviously the cost per unit's down.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, but they sell their books way, way cheaper than...

Look, we can't have a serious conversation about the CTRPG industry and include Wizards of the Coast, except as an outlier, because it is an outlier.

It's just not...

It's just what they do there is not really relevant, except in as much as they set prices.

And their behavior distorts the market because they are a de facto monopoly, which I'm sure there are people leaping to the comments, even as I speak, who do not know what a monopoly is.

It's a board game.

Because it's not.

It's a bad board game.

Yeah.

A terrible, terrible board game.

Monopoly isn't the case where you just have a single person, a single unit that's selling everything.

It's where you have a distorting effect on the market.

Tesco's was regarded as a monopoly in the UK because one in every £8 was spent at Tesco's.

Like, you know, other supermarkets are available, but it was considered to have a monopoly effect.

Anyway, that takes us to things like antitrust suits and so forth, which is...

Yeah, this is a bit of a side topic, though.

Sorry, I steered us off.

Let's get back to Pathfinder Hellbreaker's Adventure Path.

Yeah, yeah.

What do we know?

I've got the description here.

I could try and read it out for you, if you wish.

As the Hellfire crisis dawns and spreads its turmoil throughout Avistan, the nation of Izgar is being shaken up by the rebel organisation the Hellbreakers League, which seeks to break Izgar free of its oppressor and patron nation of Infernal Chelyax.

Their characters will carry out daring missions against Chalaxian strongholds, face off with their deadly hell knights and strike out against the forces of hell itself.

Okay.

Got some demons.

Liberation.

Yeah.

That's jolly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So in practical terms, like this is our subscription, would you end up paying $80 plus shipping every quarter?

Because that could be a bit of a hit to your bank balance or are they still allowing you to essentially pay in installments?

That I do not know.

Right, right.

Because that feels like it would be quite important.

Yeah, I don't know.

That would help maybe with people's cash flow.

I did notice on the product page on Poiso's website, it does say at the bottom of the description, it does say this book is part of the Adventure Path subscription program.

So I think possibly you still carry on paying this.

I don't know.

I don't know.

You've answered my question there.

So I was about to say, is it a subscription or is it just we're releasing this book by the book?

Or it might have changed to a quarterly subscription.

I think that, by the sounds of what you just said, I think that's what it is.

A quarterly subscription.

Well, we don't know.

We're just guessing.

We're just guessing.

It feels like the sort of thing we should know, but we don't know.

I think that wouldn't make sense, because what if you did monthly and then one of your payments partway through the month missed or you cancelled it, you know, they can't send you half a book.

That would just be messy.

Okay.

Yeah, no, you're right.

Yeah, it would have to be, wouldn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because if you're on a subscription service for a book and your subscription doesn't go through, they just don't send you the book.

But if that was monthly, that would be...

But if you paid for half of the book, then yeah.

Then where does it leave us?

Unless they just send you the cover or something.

Well, I mean, if somebody does the back-end...

There's somebody employed at Pfizer that just rips out some of the pages.

That's their job.

They sit there and say, right, he's only paid like two out of four subscriptions.

Will rip out all the odd favours.

I don't think that's what they'll do, but what do I do?

I just do the operations anyway.

This is why you do the operations and Russ just sits in a chair.

He would stroke a cat if he liked cats.

He does like cats.

I don't have a monocle.

You could.

Why do you think I don't like cats?

I don't understand why you think I don't like cats.

given the fact that I have a cat.

The Sharon's cat.

Is it because the cat doesn't like rust?

That's a different conversation.

It's not that the cat doesn't like me.

The cat just ignores me and pretends I don't exist.

That's very unfair.

Ripley bought you flowers only last year or the year before.

That is true.

And you spurned these gifts and were quite ungracious about them.

So quite frankly, I can see why she sees you as not liking us.

So there you go.

Oh, well.

Anyway.

I guess it's hard being a cat.

I think it is.

Bye-bye.

Anyway.

Would you like to talk about Draw or Steal?

Yeah, go on then.

Yes.

Because we got told off for not.

Waivers of the World just spotted the floor in my plan to rip out the odd-numbered pages.

Yeah, I realized that as soon as I said it.

But I thought if no one else mentions it, I won't.

But Rai says, aren't the odd-numbered pages on the back of the even-numbered pages?

Yeah.

And this is why Jess handles operations.

Not in my new format they're not all the pages are one-sided especially so that you can, in your new world order so every book is printed in a zero so that you can actually fit the titles that you have come up with on the front yeah yeah exactly exactly that's a for our new listeners this is like an old running joke about rust is level of terrible terrible titles and um how he thinks could be bigger.

And also so they could be in a sufficiently large print.

They could make them properly.

Anyway.

Drawsteel.

Yeah.

So we got told off for not covering Drawsteel when it came out.

And that was mainly because A, I hadn't realized it had come out.

And B, I hadn't seen anything about it.

And I think it kind of suffered a little bit because the Dragonheart, Daggerheart, sorry, PR machine was just kind of stomping everything in the industry for a few weeks.

Oh, yes.

who's dug a heart everywhere.

So, anyway.

Dagger Heart was killing off D&D, but sadly appears to have not done so.

No, it has not done.

It was never going to do so.

Yeah, I know.

But Draw Steel is out.

Yes yes at least in pdf you can pre-order the hard covers but in pdf it is out.

Exciting what has been released so far is the player's book which is called heroes, the monsters book which is called monsters and an adventure with a very old school looking cover on there called the Dalyan tomb.

Dalyan?

Oh, interesting.

Or Delian, maybe.

Who knows?

Or Delian.

Or Delian.

Delian.

Delian?

Yeah.

The tomb of unfinanceability.

Marvelous.

Yes.

Now it's Brooklyn.

Yeah.

Now it's Brooklyn tombs.

Yeah.

So this is like, oh, it's a big old thing.

It's like 400 pages.

These books are 400 pages with like a dense layout with lots of texts and tables and stuff.

So, there's a lot of content there.

It really is.

I'm going to say, it is a fairly...

You know 13th Age?

It's a diametrically opposite game, the 13th Age.

And I'm going to go into some description of it in a minute and you'll see why.

I'm interested to learn more.

I don't know much about it, so I'm glad you've done a deep dive and done a bit of research.

Okay.

So, so, so, so.

Do you mean 13th Age?

Okay, all right.

Yes, when I said 13th age, I meant 13th age, yeah.

Interesting.

Not the 15th.

Not the 15th age, no.

I mean, I played a lot of both age, but then...

So, this was originally called the MCDM RPG back in...

What was it?

Three years ago, I think?

2024, maybe?

Early 2024.

2023.

Project ended on January 5th, 2024.

So it was clearly an Ocrisp job.

So that was a crowd funder, which made over $4.5 million with over 30,000 backers.

So it was massive.

Enormous.

It did incredibly well.

Yes.

As you can see here, it is the fourth biggest tabletop role-playing crowdfunder in history.

Nice.

$4,500 there.

Nice.

And if you take out Avatar and Brandon Sanderson's Cosmic, because both those are kind of outliers of the 10-plus region, it's kind of the second biggest.

And Gloomhoven, I suppose, you would take out, because it was a board game with an attached role-playing game.

So it might likely be.

I will stand on that point because it's like and as Gloomhaven box is like 140, 150 quid and like slapping like a tiny little, role-playing game on top of it and it's like oh it's a role-playing game no it isn't in fairness, I don't think it was a tiny role-playing game stuff on it I think that is actually a role-playing game version there is a hefty book that goes with it so I will I will stand on the other side and I do take your point if you have to buy a 150 quid board game to play a role-playing game like I see why it did well but I will say it's a role-playing game I mean perhaps I was confused about the size of the role-playing game due to the enormity of the box it was next to perhaps that's really off who can say alright so yeah either way top five arguably I suppose technically you could say it's the, biggest original like non-licensed TTRPG crowdfunder ever Yeah, yeah, I can see that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

By a long shot, in fact.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I did really, really well.

So, I thought I'd do a quick sort of dive into it.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Now, bear in mind that I've not played this game.

Yes.

And I might get some of this wrong, and someone will shout at me, and fine.

But we're not worried about that.

Why are you doing this then?

This is your understanding of the game from reading it and researching it.

So, this is the news you're presenting us.

Yes.

Yeah.

Got it.

Yeah.

So, just the look of it.

The art is incredible.

It's gorgeous.

From the cover, it looks really classic fantasy, but with some interesting twists and monsters.

Because looking in the background, I can see some, like, there's some classic imps and things, but then there's a weird skull spiky worm thing with skulls on.

So it looks classic fantasy, but interesting, which I think the picture is interesting.

I saw someone online say that it...

It's an angel, I guess.

Yeah, someone online said it very much reminds them of the art style, very much sort of like the Marvel films.

It's kind of like everyone can fly around and shoot laser beams and has lightning crackling off their weapons and, you know, all this sort of stuff.

That's kind of a bit comic book-y, I suppose, in a sense.

I mean, yeah, in the sense that we've got that whole quadratic mages, linear marshals going on.

Yeah, that's the visual language that it's giving me.

Like, you've got a room, they've got a sharp sword, very good with a sword.

And you've got a cleric who can empower their mace with magical power whilst also blasting away with their other hand.

Great start.

I mean, in fairness, this sort of game, you do want that level of power fantasy.

I want to play this type of fantasy role-playing game because I want to feel like a big Dan Perry.

So yeah, I do want to jump around shooting lasers and magic whatever.

You play the person who can jump around doing magic lasers out of their hands or you can play the Cherson of the Sword.

Yeah.

I have a slight problem.

My earphones just pinged at me, telling me that they're about to run out of battery.

Possibly we should skip to a break.

That's a good idea.

Should we do that?

Let's do a break.

Let's do a quick break.

Right.

Okay.

We're back.

We're back.

We're back.

We're back.

We're back.

Talking about Draw Steel, which was released a couple of weeks ago in PDF format, not yet in print.

We were just talking about the art style and how gorgeous, how utterly gorgeous this book is.

Yes, there's an armour.

It's like a beholder, but obviously legally distinct because it's a heavily armoured one, if you can imagine such a thing.

With beasts with locked eyes.

And its eyeballs are not on stalks.

Not on stalks, yes.

It's not all stalks.

It's like a tentacly meatball with teeth and many eyes wearing a helmet.

Yes.

Yes, I think that's fair.

And lots of teeth rows and rows of them mmm shut up, No.

It's also got teeth around its central eyeball, which feels...

Does it bite people with its eyeballs?

No.

Don't you?

Imagine how painful...

You know when you get an eyelash in your eye and it's kind of a bit painful?

Imagine if a tooth came loose and got in your eye.

Sounds for worse.

But anyway, we like the art, is the summary of that question.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, it is like very, very high production values.

I mean, given the fact that it made four and a half million dollars on Kickstarter, That's no surprise.

You would expect it to be very high production values, but it is gorgeous.

So one of the things about this thing is it's very cinematic.

Like the GM is called the director, and the whole game is set up to make sure you can always do something.

You're always doing something.

So, you know, it takes out a lot of the things that take you out of the game, like stuns and things like that, to make sure you're always playing.

You can't whiff anymore.

you can't miss, you can't even miss anymore.

In combat, for example, when you make an attack, you do damage, even if you make a really bad roll.

And instead of hit points, they have stamina, because it basically means the opponent still had to use up stamina to defend against that attack.

So basically, it's not damage on a miss, but it's like there is no miss.

It's like every roll...

It does something.

You were telling me this was the exact opposite of 13th Age, and that sounds very similar to that.

Wait till you see how tactical and gritty and complex it is, though.

13th Age does famously not involve grids, which is actually a big...

This is very, very heavily grid-based.

Very heavily.

There's an awful lot of abilities and things, and it describes distances and squares, even, rather than distance.

It's that grid base.

It's saying this thing is two squares high rather than 10 feet high, sort of thing.

Okay.

Yeah.

So it is a complex game.

I mean, the basic system is you use 2D10.

To attack or attack.

And whatever you roll, something's going to happen.

You're not going to roll, you attack roll, and nothing happens.

So basically, what happens is you get different tiers of effect.

Is this a B100 roll?

No, 2D10.

So you've got a bell curve adding the shoot numbers together.

Okay, yeah.

So if you roll 11 or less, you get a Tier 1 result.

If you roll 12 to 16, you get a Tier 2 result.

If you roll 17 to 18, you get a Tier 3 result.

And then 19 to 20 is a crit.

Okay, that's good.

and what's interesting there is at no point was an armor class requested so if you're making an attack roll you're making that roll if you roll nine you've got a tier one result the defender's attack armor class is irrelevant yeah it sounds like they've considered the problems of playing at a table for instance saving throws are actually surprisingly time intensive because like a dnd saving throw you have to say okay i need you to make a save and as the gm i have to say okay what save would i have to make and you say dexterity and i have to ask you again what's your day what's the difficulty class of this save so i have to roll it makes up for that in other ways it is a complex game and you know it's the attack but it's like yeah but the attack rolls are quick and i'm guessing that there are various different.

Defences that you have in a manner similar to say 13th age.

Defences in what sense?

In the sense that armour class or whatever would not be the only thing.

There would be something.

No, you don't roll against a defence.

That's the point.

You don't roll against a defence.

You just hit it.

It's a straight roll.

And if you roll, then, you know, a tier 1 result will be, okay, you do this damage.

Tier 2 would be, oh, you do a bit more damage and you add this condition.

Tier 3 would be, oh, you do more damage and you add a couple of conditions.

And then a crit is like a Tier 3, but you also get an extra action.

You get to take an extra action because you critted.

Yeah, so I've just taken a whole pile of, stuff out of the table interactions, which wasn't really doing that much in the first place.

Okay, I like what they're doing.

Tell me more.

Yeah, so that's basically the basic system.

So character creation is a big old section in the book.

It's quite complex.

It's very, very customizable.

Lots and lots and lots of options to choose.

Loads of them.

Yeah.

So we've got ancestries.

So there's 12 of those.

And they kind of, you can tell they're kind of steering away from D&D.

So while they do have a human, a dwarf, an elf, and an orc, and a halfling, they change those, and also they add a devil, a memonok, or memonek, sorry, which is faster if you make out some kind of alien robot, I think.

We've got revenants, which are undead.

We've got like time raiders which are like Githyanki with four arms and then we've got humans we've got dwarfs but they actually have kind of rocky, I think they're made of rock but there's a rocky element to their biological makeup yeah yeah we've got high elves we've got woed elves w-o-d-e elves which I guess is wood elves I guess yeah yeah right yeah There's changes that are exciting.

We've got some half-hands, which are giants, or like half-giants.

That's pictured on the hero's book.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We've got orcs.

We've got half-things, but they're not called half-things.

They're called polders, and they can meld into the shadows.

Ooh.

Selfie.

And then we've got these sort of dragonborn types as well.

Yeah.

I mean, I guess I am immediately a little disappointed because it feels like they're just going back to those whole, Racial stereotypes, like you wouldn't have a polder that would be raised in the Wodell tradition.

No, no, no.

They do separate out biology and culture.

Okay.

Didn't sound like it, but I'm excited again.

Let's go.

Yeah.

So we have ancestries each have these signature traits, and then they have a bunch of optional purchase traits you can choose from.

So each ancestry, you know, you're making choices, is even though you've chosen a dwarf, you're then choosing a bunch of different things.

You've got a heritage, you've got a gift to go with it.

This is not like, it's an answer where we rest.

That's right.

Yeah, yeah.

Right versus the world, any half-elf, did I miss the half-elf?

Not as far as I can see, unless I also missed it.

But maybe you can have dual, what do they call it, biology?

Ancestry?

Ancestries.

Mixed ancestry.

Mixed ancestry.

I don't know if you can or not.

I don't know.

It might be that they're going down the route of these are species and therefore you wouldn't get a mixing of it which has its own problems anyway sorry so anyway you then choose your culture, and these add languages and skills.

Good this is very A5E so far to be honest I know I'm approving of it it sounds like the sort of.

Setting inherent to it which you could build on and like yeah so yes this is how this works and that'll be good yeah uh you then choose a career okay which i think is kind of a lot like a background basically you can be a gladiator or a politician or something and it gives you.

A bit of backstory some perks and you also have inciting incidents oh nice nice tell me more about that to be honest oh tease no sorry sorry okay yeah i mean but but backstory generated in character would actually be quite good uh because it's actually a fairly difficult problem to resolve because again as i mentioned many people do not enjoy homework in their ttrpgs so one of the things i'm currently working on is a backstory generator has a writing frame to help people dig into their characters and that's right that's the beautiful thing about life path games that's what i love about life path games because it does that for you brilliant i love that yeah absolutely and this this has that feel which i am enjoying like maybe not quite as getting as quite as hard as traveler but i feel not entirely dissimilar either well i guess like these sort of inside the instance might be similar to like in backgrounds in our game we have mementos and contacts don't we and then the contacts might be in the army captain who abandoned you during during that retreat or a lost lover who you haven't seen since or whatever it'll be something like that so that's similar i think in concept i don't know how more in depth they go or not.

Yeah yeah then you've got perks which are kind of feats which you can choose complications, which are things like, you might be a cult victim, or you might have a magical disease, or you might have an elemental that lives inside you, or something.

Okay, so there's the possibility of a bit of disability representation.

Sadly, conspicuous by absence in the artwork.

Let me show you two pieces of artwork.

There's art on every page, every page in these books.

There are three pages that I...

Three pieces of art.

Oh, right.

Okay, okay.

But that's just the ones I chose to show you.

But there are literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pieces of artwork in these books.

So, I don't think you can judge whether there's something represented in the artwork or not just by looking at these pieces.

As I say, there is the opportunity for disability representation.

I am fingers crossed that they will come through it.

Yeah.

Okay, then we have the classes.

There are nine classes.

These are the sensor, which is a bit like a paladin.

We have the conduit which I think is a bit cleric-y-ish sensor how are you spelling sensor?

C-E-N-S-O-R okay, We have the Elementalist.

We have the Fury, which is kind of a barbarian.

We have the Null, N-U-L-L, which is a bit like a monk, I think.

The Shadow, which is a bit roguey.

The Taptician, which is a bit fighter-y.

Well, a touch of martial, I would think, in fact.

Yes, yeah, a bit.

The War of the Best.

Yeah, and fighter-y, though.

Yeah, okay.

right, right.

The talent, which is the psionic class.

Yes, that for me means that the Gnull has like more, that I now hear talent and the psychic powers are now expecting the Gnull to have an effect which nullifies and has a calming effect around them, which gets rid of magic and so forth.

I don't know if that's what I'm expecting.

No, no, I know.

Back on.

And then you have the Troubadour, which is basically they're barred.

Yeah.

So, it's got a level cap of 10, levels 1 to 10.

But at each level, you are choosing between 60 to 100 features.

Between, not choosing 60 to 100, you have a choice of between 60 and 100 features per level, per class.

It's that complex and dense and cramped.

That's what I said, it's a complex game.

There's a lot of stuff in there.

You go up a level, or you've got a big old menu of stuff to choose from.

It's really interesting.

I mean, Jessica?

I was just thinking, we were saying earlier, there's some people that love building characters and trying stuff out.

This seems like this is the game for them.

I think clearly one of the goals here is that no two characters will ever be the same.

So I think the odds on two characters being the same, given the number of choices you're making at every single stage of character creation process, would make the odds on two people having even vaguely similar characters at the table quite unlikely.

Yes i am quietly hopeful that they will not have repeated the design processes or say third edition and include trap options so that you do not have to have complete system mastery before you start playing like you know and that you'll be able to pick stuff you know i do i do feel that this game is one that will reward system mastery the sense i get from this is yeah yeah it is that type of, I don't know about traps, but, you know.

Oh, yeah.

Well, traps were a thing by design in third edition, which was as a choice.

But anyway, yes.

Back on.

Anyway.

Yeah.

Anyway, anyway.

So, it's really interesting.

You know, I don't know if I'd actually ate it myself, but it's got a thing, metacurrencies.

This is an interesting choice.

It's got a metacurrencies, but each class has a different metacurrency.

Okay, yep.

So we've got the Fury gains ferocity when they take damage.

Okay, yeah.

The Troubadour gains drama when a number of your allies do a combo.

Okay, yeah.

I mean, I'm quite liking this because you've got the eight classes and the Hype Man, which, you know, why not?

But it feels like these metacurrencies are if i say player adjudicated it's like you know you would know your own metacurrency as part of learning your character and it feels very much like you're expected to learn your character because yes yeah expecting your gm to know this is there's no bueno yeah yeah well let me go through go through them so that was the theory in the troubadour's metacurrency.

The censor gets wrath when a judged target, so I guess one of the censor's abilities is to judge a target, when they damage their judged target or when their judged target damages you.

The judged target feels like a marked target kind of thing.

The conduit gains piety by praying.

Okay.

The elementalist gains essence by damaging their target.

All right.

The null gains discipline.

And they get that when someone acts near them or when the GM uses malice, which is the GM's own metacurrency.

I like that it's called malice.

That's very good.

Strong.

The shadows is called insight.

The tacticians is called focus.

And the talents is called clarity.

I mean, the talents one, they gain clarity whenever there's a forced movement.

This is very specific still.

You know, all these things are making me intrigued to play as a player, but I think I'll be a bit hesitant to GM this because I think this feels a bit like, and I don't want to blister it by saying it, but there was a lot of spin-offs of D&D after, you know, 2021.

The D20 explosion, yeah.

Yeah, and this feels like something that's really exciting for the players and I know other systems are like exciting for the GM but this I don't know this makes me want to be a player but I don't think I'm rushing to run a game from my immediate first impressions maybe I'm missing things but, I would be interested in sitting down to a game maybe that's what I mean but I can't say.

Yeah I mean let's have a look at one of the classes here oh yes please I've got a look at the tactician there I don't know if you can actually read that.

It might not be a clear enough image.

But you can see sort of what the tactician looks like at character creation.

He sort of reminds me of like a Sikh bloke, which I know is a bit of a weird thing to say, but he's just got like that long flowing black hair.

And yeah, Marshall and ready to kick ass and take names.

Nice.

Some really good art there.

And you were telling me the layout was dense.

That's actually quite a friendly layout.

They've clearly paid a good deal of money for graphic design.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of tables in this book, though.

Yeah, you've got...

A lot of tables.

...health, skills, kits, basic attacks, resistance roles, features, a list of them.

There's a lot of information there.

It is well laid out, but there is...

There's a lot of information there.

This isn't a light role-playing game, but it never presented itself as such.

I am consumed with curiosity about the flavor text quote, which is being partially obscured by the logo of the show.

Hang on, I can change that.

Let me just update that.

It says, your line is broken, Varrox, your wizard is dead.

Ha ha, you should have negotiated.

Okay, okay, I'm definitely warming to this game because a good bit of flavor text is just making me say, yes, I could see my...

This tells me a lot about how the character should be played, I would argue.

It's like, yeah, sucks to be you, sucks to suck.

Let's talk about combat a little bit, because this is a very combat-heavy game.

Gross deal.

So it's tactical grid-based combat, and I pretty much have to use a grid with this.

So that's fine.

Initiative is interesting.

So initiative is alternating side initiative.

So one side goes first, they choose which one of them is going to act, then the other side goes, then the first side goes, then the other side goes.

Now popcorn is slightly different.

So popcorn is each person after taking their turn chooses who goes next.

So that's popcorn initiative.

And then it can be one of their own side or one of the other side, depending on how you want to kind of stack up like a bunch of people together or spread them out or whatever.

This one, side-based, alternating side is, The PCs go, so the PCs between them decide which one of them is going to go.

Then the monsters go, and then the GM decides which monster is going to go, and so forth.

So it's side-by-side, but nominate, so interesting.

I don't know how that works with unequal numbers on each side.

I assume there's a...

Yeah, it might be a mechanism where the players have one and then the GM has two going or something, I don't know.

Yeah, I'm sure the action economy is finally balanced because he does not feel that they would neglect this important part.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, the action economy, so your action is based into a move, a maneuver, and a main action.

Although you can demote the main action to a move or a maneuver, I believe.

Okay.

There's loads of conditions, prone, restrained, taunted, and weakened, and so forth.

As we mentioned earlier, damage is dealt every time you attack.

Whether or...

It's not a you hit or you miss.

It's you make the attack to see how good your attack is.

And that's how much damage you do.

So every attack will do something, even if it just meekens the enemy's stamina by a little bit, because it's defending the initial attack.

Yeah.

For example, and one of the things I'm noticing straight away is a tactician that you've got up here.

And I noticed they've got a taunt mechanic, which is deeply lacking from various forms of 5th edition.

Because there's no real reason, as if you play a computer game, often the enemies will just walk past your front line and attack the back line.

And you're like, that's illegal.

No, it's not.

Whereas here, you can say, no, pay attention to me, which I'm intrigued by to see how it plays out.

Yeah.

So, yeah, so the combat, very, very strong focus on positioning and tactical play.

There's a lot of things which sort of push enemies and do forced movement, and your exact position matters, and your height matters, and all this sort of stuff.

So it's very, very sort of, very tactical combat.

Very tactical and kind of cinematic everyone's jumping around and doing exciting things all the time nice they also have a negotiation rule set in there as well basically social combat in a way that makes sense based on the quote saying you should have negotiated.

Yeah so an mpc, So an NPC has two scores.

One is called interest and one is called patience.

And what you're trying to do is increase their interest without running out their patience.

And they go from zero to five.

So you want to try and get the interest up to five before the patience hits zero.

That's nice.

I like that thematically and also it seems simple enough mechanically.

Yeah.

The way it's kind of presented is you make sort of social roles using reason, intuition, or presence, which are kind of three mental ability scores.

But also certain arguments, each NPC has motivations and pitfalls.

So if you use an argument or say something which matches a motivation, that will build interest.

You don't know what the NPC's motivations and pitfalls are necessarily unless you've maybe discovered them some other way.

If it was me, you'd be like, Jess, why are we fighting?

We could just go play Baldur's Gate 3.

Exactly.

That would be a strong...

And that would build interest.

It would.

And then if you say something which is one of their pitfalls, that will drain their patience.

Yeah.

When she says, Baldur's Gate 3 is terrible, we should play a better game.

Yes.

There's no accounting for taste, PJ.

Yeah.

I was just demonstrating a pitfall for you, which was a...

Yes.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

right yikes yeah yeah so that sounds pretty interesting it reminds me very strongly of exalted second edition which also had a social combat thing which worked pretty much exactly that same way which i quite enjoyed i'd you know i'd love to see how it plays into that because it's kind of it does lean very much into making ability score ability checks rather than role-playing but it does say that good role-playing could mean an automatic success and.

Pushing us by the seething brew of toxicity which is the phrase good role playing and what that means to people yeah let us not, let us move away from that so like basically you're doing a stunt, which is like I think that's quite interesting because you're sort of it's adding a tactical element to a social situation in that you're trying to work out what people want and then once you know roughly what they like and possibly dislike then you would focus your arguments on that and if you constructed a clever set of words to go through it then maybe that would lower the difficulty class or you'd gain bonuses from mentioning the right things which would be more entertaining for the people at the table than saying i'd like to rule to persuade them yeah maybe that's what they are but bear in mind there are no difficulty classes in this you're never running against a target number.

You're making your check and then you're getting a tiered result.

Yeah, but presumably you'd add a bonus from getting these motivations or whatever you're calling them.

Yeah, I don't know whether that's a bonus or whether that just automatically sort of you hit one of their pitfalls that automatically drains a point of patience, for example, or whether, I don't know whether that's the case.

Yeah, like you construct a good enough speech, but that feels like that's relying on what I'd call a hard skill, which is the ability to think on your feet to process language quickly and effectively which i happen to be quite good at because i have spent years practicing how to do that sort of thing and which other people find extremely difficult because they have problems with processing language so you know there are definitely it's a it's a it's a it's actually a really complicated topic so i'll shut up now.

I sense Russ's patience will be draining rapidly.

Do you have anything to peek us in?

Look, a dog.

I don't know.

A dog would do it.

Yeah.

What else have we got?

So we've got some downtime stuff, which can include some great big large-scale things like roads and things, building roads and airships.

That's nice.

So if you do big projects during your downtime.

I think I've kind of covered most of what I know about this game, to be honest.

There's obviously tons, tons more to say about it, but I haven't played the game.

I couldn't i couldn't say i mean news really is it's out and this is the small amount of stuff that i know about it is what the news is i mean has a has a gm i would be interested in can i, farm off the building various creations and so forth to the players so they can do all the hard work and i i can say oh yeah good job you've completed all the bits and pieces or would i have like do more work for them like make witness roles and so forth which not my favorite thing to do i'll be honest yeah it feels like a lot of the world building stuff is kind of strongly written into the game especially with a lot of the sort of devils and psionics and scythes almost bordering on sci-fi stuff at times yeah very much built into sort of actual existing world law which.

I assume comes from an existing world maybe matt colville's own setting perhaps or i don't know but that seems quite heavily baked in yeah like it's a game where you have to embrace weird fiction which i'm not against i think weird fiction is quite cool although will i like the setting that they produce enough to really get into it i don't know that's that's a problem because i don't enjoy, I don't enjoy reading encyclopedias.

Some people do.

But I play to them.

Bad.

Bad for them.

Everyone should have their own fun.

But for me, if you give me this whole gazette here or...

Manual of the planes or something it's like it doesn't excite me um but that's just a meat problem so a lot of people love that stuff a lot of people will not like really love that buy those forgotten melms books and all are over them you know a lot of people like those stuff or those coffee table books about um we got a coffee table book about the alien it's got the Weyland-Yutani, something, manual something, research manual or something.

Yeah, exactly.

It's got all the details and lots of little bits.

And a lot of people love that stuff and will just pour it.

I mean, I have read a Michael Crixton book or two in my time.

I'm not averse to it like, you know, in a fictionalized setting, but I do prefer the sort of thing that would make me want to learn by playing rather than by running.

So, you know.

Yeah.

But that's okay.

It doesn't have to be for me it can be for other people and maybe they'll enjoy it in fact it sounds like yeah if you like really complicated systems with lots of customizability lots of granularity lots of little knobs to twiddle and you want to really dig into lore and have it be strongly reflected in your character choices this does sound like it's gonna be an excellent system yeah yeah yeah I agree.

Yeah, I just feel it just got slightly, you know, eclipsed by Daggerheart's massive PR juggernaut in the last few weeks.

Or maybe they're just waiting for the Daggerheart PR juggernaut to die down a bit and then they're going to do one of their own because, you know, MTDM has a big reach.

Yeah.

Big, big reach.

So maybe, maybe, you know, give it two or three months when Daggerheart's has died down a bit.

We're going to be hearing about Draw Steel constantly, maybe.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, It's entirely possible.

People have to actually read the books first.

And maybe there'll be a nice YouTube explainer.

You never know.

There are.

There's loads of YouTubes about it, if you want to do a note for them.

Yeah.

Okay.

I watch a couple, but most of them are like seven hours long, and I'm like, I don't have seven hours.

Seven hours.

My interest has been piqued.

I think if I see this being run at a convention, I would jump to have a play and see what it's about.

I'm not willing to buy it and run it, though.

but that's but i do want to i am interested i definitely it's one it's one of those games i want to play to see if i like it first you know sometimes you hear about a game you're like that's for me gonna buy that it's not one of those for me but i'm very interested i think it i yeah i like a lot of the things you mentioned so yeah watch this space i think the draw still starter set, is going to the quick start guide that's going to be something that you know i would probably want to pick up and have a look they're also working on their own vtt as well wow okay so it's your table job would that have character building in as well or i assume so i'd be amazed if it didn't i can't imagine they're not yeah now what is the point i guess because also they would really struggle to get demi plane or something to do it for them and i don't think D&D Beyond would be up to the job.

It would be all right.

Okay.

Just too many options for that interface.

Well, D&D Beyond doesn't do anything but D&D.

There weren't any non-D&D products on D&D Beyond.

This is not D&D or even much like it.

Yeah.

Ironically, they didn't go beyond D&D.

Yes, you would have thought they would, wouldn't you?

Yeah.

So my question in the chat said, I'm just worried about the 81 hits all the time thing.

I was wondering to sort of mention that very quickly because I don't think that's what it is.

Because they very specifically don't have hit points.

They have stamina.

And what that is saying is, you went to swing at them and they blocked your attack, but it used up a little bit of their stamina to do so.

I think, you know, if you attack and you just get like a tier one thing, you do a little bit of stamina damage to them.

What it is, is they've exerted some stamina defending against your attack.

So I don't think it is everyone hits all the time.

It's a different strategy than playing in D&D.

Because in D&D, if you hit every time, it's like, well, we just have to keep going and eventually we're going to grind them down.

But like you mentioned, Russ, because it doesn't work like that, it's not like it's going to be just a grind of how many hit points to bring it down by.

It's a different thing.

Well, like this, and I don't propose going into this in depth, but we don't actually really understand what hit points are because they've never been properly defined.

Has a consent.

They've been defined a lot of times.

It's just that everybody just likes having that argument and claims they haven't been.

Sure, sure.

It's been defined a lot of times.

So you can stab a level 20 barbarian like, I don't know, 80, 90, 100 times.

We can have this conversation, but we can have this conversation.

We know all of the arguments on either side of that conversation and how that conversation goes.

There's no point in having it.

Yeah, I feel stamina is maybe a bit better to fight.

I don't think that they have been well-defined, in my opinion, but you differ, and I think maybe that's part of the problem.

So I don't know if that helps you outright, Rai versus world, but yeah, like, don't think of it as stamina.

So I did watch a bit of a YouTube of them playing this, and they were in this combat, And I didn't watch it in 4Way scrubbed through it because it was long.

I was just trying to get a sense.

But there was, just to get an idea of the complexity of it, and we were sort of saying that, oh, this sounds like this will speed combat up.

And I said, I don't think it will because the actual result was, certainly in the video I watched, and that was by MCDM, they were fighting like six goblins and it took them an hour.

Yeah.

Which was a long time, a long, long time.

What was the holdup for us?

Because there's so much detail and so much fiddly stuff going on constantly.

Like you're working out exact positions and movement and all this sort of stuff, and people are using all these different abilities.

So while the actual attack roll is boiled down to one roll, it makes up for complexity in other ways.

Right, right, okay.

Six really hench goblins, maybe.

Yeah.

And one of my problems with games is sort of like, you know, even in D&D I get this, is generally when it comes down to my turn, I know what I'm doing, and I'll say what I'm doing, and my turn will be over within sort of 17 seconds.

Yeah.

Really quick.

I know what I'm doing, and I do it.

And then I sit there, and I wait 20 minutes for my next turn.

And I'm having 17 minutes of gameplay every 20 minutes.

I just switch on.

I just get so bored.

You know i switch off i tune out of the game completely so i think this probably helps a little with that but it does worry me you know with the fact that everyone's doing stuff all the time but it does worry me that combats can take an hour to fight six goblins that that worries me a little because i remember those 40 dnd 40 fights it just dragged on and on and on and on and you I didn't play a lot, but as I answered it, the main problems were big bags of hit points.

And even when you basically won, there was still a grind ahead.

And also, there are a lot of reactions out of turn.

So, yeah, it slows things down a lot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I can see, like, as a GM, I would have a nightmare time keeping back of that sort of thing.

So, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Interesting stuff.

No, but, you know, it does sound like it'd be fun.

I think it'd be, and with Jess here, I would love to play this game.

Love to run?

Not so much.

It does look amazing.

It looks like an accomplishment.

It looks like a really, really highly engineered, well-crafted game.

It's gorgeous.

It's complex and tactical.

I haven't, as I say, played it.

I don't know whether that, you know, whether that translates to actual play, but I suspect they've done an awful lot of playtesting, so I suspect it does.

I don't know.

I liken it to kind of like, almost like Pathfinder 2E, you know, as compared to 5E, and that that is, but more so.

It goes further.

Yeah, yeah.

It's more Pathfinder 2E than Pathfinder 2E is, which is another thing.

A very technical accomplishment.

What I would, I think what I would love is I would love the computer game version.

I'd love it.

Yeah, just like play it online with mates and do a run-through and then I can be an expert on my character.

I'm having a good time and like, you know, you're just like watching and the computer does all the heavy lifting, which would be nice.

Yeah.

Anyway, that's basically all I have to say about Drawsteel.

There's quite a lot you had to say.

Thanks for sharing it.

There's quite a lot.

Yeah, I did a big old dive this morning.

They're about 50 quid per book.

£50 per book.

I think it was like £52 or something.

But there were £48 last week when I looked, so they've changed, but there were like £52 for each of the two books.

You get the PDF with it.

That's good.

That is in dollars.

Yeah.

So in dollars, it's...

$40?

Unless they're selling cheaper over there.

Less than that, but yeah, yeah, yeah.

Very bad at marketing.

That's what I'd expect to pay for a system like this.

That's, yeah.

That sounds what I was expecting.

Yeah.

by Truman Vaughan.

Yes, let's.

Right, I think we've got a big old section where it's all about you now, Peter.

PJ, it's a bad thing.

That you put up on the list on the running order, so let's do them.

Okay.

Are we ready for number one?

Okay.

Apocalypse World Burned Over.

Oh, okay, now we're doing something else.

We're going to...

We're doing them in the order, they're in the running order.

And the first one is a comprehensive guide to TTRPG art commissioning and licensing yeah well this was on I would say our corners patreon I've not particularly heard of them before but I had a look and was it was one of those sets of information where it took my understanding because obviously I have done some commissioning and helped people with licensing for their art in TTRPG terms, it really filled in a lot of blanks for me.

It's a fairly lengthy document, but it is for free, which is a hard price to beat.

And to the best of my understanding, it is also accurate.

So if you are a designer working in the TTRPG space, or an artist, I would say, working in the TTRPG space, then this is very much worth looking at because it gives you.

Ballpark figures or does it talk about prices about it does talk about prices so obviously there will be some dating to it but like it's mentioning like 500 for a cover which was pretty interesting and goes through and looks at things like half pages and quarter pages and acknowledges and brings out the discrepancies between how ttrpg publishers that are well established like on the company scale work because and how it's like looking at from an artist's perspective and it says things that are true like having backgrounds on a quarter page piece isn't really going to be that much cheaper because you still got a lot of work whereas like a piece of spot art which is something like a sword or like a skull no background less work i'm like yeah this is a really helpful thing so to me i felt it was really helpful and made a lot of sense and really help disambiguate, a lot of the murkiness that surrounds trying to buy and sell off your ttrpg, sounds like a good resource yeah yeah i i mean and how to say it's like someone's patreon post and they put it out free so like i've joined their patreon on the basis of it because it's like well well, this is good sense, and that is rare nowadays.

I'm interested, yeah.

So not a huge amount to say about it.

Check out the full details in the show notes.

I'm looking at it now, it's long.

It's an enormous post.

It's going to take you a good couple of hours to read through it.

It's big.

Yeah, I have not got to the end of it, But from the bits I worked through, it filled in some gaps in my knowledge, made some really good points.

And yeah, I have it bookmarked.

I'm definitely going to go back and have more of a read.

I thought I would share it with our audience.

As you say, a big old post.

We cannot do it justice in time that we've got remaining.

Okay, next.

Next, tell us about Revolution, Inc.

Revolution, Inc.

Right.

Oh, that is a...

Sorry, let me just grab up the notes because I do have quite a lot of stuff.

That is a Choose Your Own Adventure book, which is in hypertext format, which I was pretty excited about.

It is by AC Danvers, and you are, as I recall, playing a, it's got sort of a blazer in the field, you're playing a bunch of robots or something that are trying to join the ranks of Revolution Incorporated, and they're troubleshooters who are the galaxy leader in all forms of direct action, as sanctioned by the Charter and Galactic Insurrection.

Are you resisting an alien occupation, overthrowing wrongly elected socialist leaders, or sabotaging dangerous international diplomacy.

Revolution is the first choice of the galaxy's finest corporations who seek only the freedom and liberty to apply their trades among the stars uninhibited by misguided ideals and anti-capitalist sentiments.

So for those who are like saying, what on earth is this?

I would say it's basically the CIA role-playing game and industry leaders in destabilization, insurrection and regimes changed since 2086.

So a thinly veiled metaphor for cia and if you are interested in overthrowing popular movements and installing your own dictatorships this could be the game for you villains has protagonists is a valid way to play fair okay okay i know a whole bunch of cool crowdfunding things we've seen So maybe if we, because we've been going on a while, maybe if we do a quick whistle to start some shout outs of some fun things that have been seen.

Okay, so number one, Apocalypse World Burned Over.

Yes, this is not a current Kickstarter, but for people who are fond of general emulators, this is the granddaddy of them all, Apocalypse World first edition, created powered by the apocalypse.

And has had countless, countless imitators and users of the game system over the years.

Vince and Megway Baker, I feel it's like it's an important piece of art.

People should be aware of it.

So that's why I'm shouting out.

Not currently Kickstarter, but for parents.

It's coming soon, isn't it?

Is that correct?

It's true.

It's coming soon.

And it's basically the third edition of Apocalypse World, basically.

Yeah.

Correct.

Oh, great.

Yeah.

And even if you haven't played Apocalypse World, you may well have played a game that was powered by the apocalypse because there's so many of them out there.

It's a big influential game.

Yeah.

If you manage to avoid playing it somehow, do let us know because I'm like, good job.

A lot of people just play D&D, as you know.

Yeah.

But I assume our listeners listening to this general TTRPG podcast are interested in games other than D&D as well as D&D.

Who knows?

concerning listeners or me okay next one was one I saw so Pendragon, 50 years old now, 1985 is when Pendragon first came out, and they are republishing the original edition, the 1985 edition.

I will say this is 40 years old, but please continue.

I was about to say, I was like, not 50.

40, sorry, yes, not 50, yes.

So the company, Chaosium, is 50 years old.

You had me worried about my age then, because I was also born in the 80s, and I was like, how old am I?

Did I think 10 years?

The Power of Confluent.

It's been a really long podcast.

What can I tell you?

We've been recording it for 10 years, so yeah.

Chaosium is 50 years old.

Pendragon is 40 years old.

Correct.

Yes.

There we go.

I feel like we had a new edition of Greg Stafford's masterpiece, Magnum Opus.

Last year.

Was it just last year that it came out?

Yeah, but this isn't a new edition.

This is the original 1985 one.

They're just republishing it as a sort of practice piece, I guess.

So exactly as it was back then as well.

They're not changing it.

They're not updating it.

They're just republishing the sunbook.

Classic edition.

Nostalgia value.

Yeah.

The times.

Yeah, it's nice cover.

Yeah.

I've not played Pentagon, but I know a lot of people have a lot of good things to say.

Yeah.

Oogie.

Oogie doogie.

Next one, next on the menu is, oh, what is this?

Full Send, a tarot-based mountaineering RPG, which is a combination of words which I never expected to see.

Yeah.

You have, with laser accuracy, identified why I thought I would plug this up.

Because I'm like, this sounds absolutely mad.

This is a live Kickstarter 12 days ago As of the 5th of September It's done 4,140 of a £4,500 goal So I'm going to say it will fund I feel pretty confident At this stage, 143 backers, It's looking at real-life Mountain Peaks from Everest at El Capitan, and it has a game which involves using tarot cards to conquer these summits.

Is this a solo game?

I don't know, to be honest.

I imagine it is compatible with solo.

It's designed for three to five players and a facilitator.

Okay, so it's not a solo game.

Okay.

not not also a game i i think like a solo mode would be great but yeah it lets you do existing peaks and also procedurally generated so you can make your own and let's talk about tarot powered and trick taking which is i'm not 100 sure on card game things but basically like making a suit or something Jessica do you know taking would mean possibly I'm bad at giving a succinct explanation so I'm gonna move on yeah fair enough and apparently a lot of the fun is in the downtime where you have freeform roleplay between actually finding yourself up a mountain so yeah that's like it's going to be yeah I it I thought by Laurie O'Connell I looked at it and thought oh This is pretty cute.

Looks like a safe place to put your money, I guess.

Looks like something different as well.

Like that's a, yeah.

Yeah.

It's not D&D.

Hey!

Indeed.

I was just thinking a good thing.

I have not climbed a mountain, unless you count Snowden.

I have, but you don't really climb Snowden.

You walk up Snowden.

Yeah.

You can even stroll if you want.

And there's a train.

A gentle stroll, yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, next one.

Oh, this one.

Rodomino Barocco.

Yes.

Is that one of those effervescent supplements you get that you put in your water?

Well, certainly if you get this, it may well make you feel better.

This is actually a physical prop.

It is an unfolding spell book.

No.

Which, like, it's expensive to back.

I will say by the way it has funded uh on eight and a half thousand pounds of six thousand pound goal with 20 days to go and 313 backers it's if you if you scroll down you can see that it basically comes out like an accordion oh okay cool yeah yeah yeah and it's like full of if you i mean has a larper yes you might also find this pretty interesting to have a look at because like you know if you just want to be like sitting there looking at a book full of intriguing and mysterious like almost like alchemist style illustrations then this very much has you covered it comes in digital format as well but there's a lot of, It is basically like if you've ever looked at a really old book that people wrote on Magic, you would have a good time looking at this.

So, high power of Greco.

Yeah, very high production values.

Looks really cool, basically.

I thought I would shout it out because it's not some PC every day.

There's another two on the list here, which I'm fairly sure weren't there when I did the slides.

but there's Skies Above and Asher's Ridge.

Okay.

So I don't have graphics for those, I'm afraid.

Okay.

Well, Skies Above, we've actually covered on this podcast previously.

Okay.

It's by Lost Haven Games and I learnt what an Ashcan edit was, which I didn't know previously.

So this is just launched.

It's a JRPG style thing.

This is the one with the cute little cats with like a little tamashantas and a little harp it's got wings and i went through it quite enjoyed it full of illustrations by the creator and yeah leading into the jrpg business i haven't seen the latest draft but yeah again go for a full hardcover a four size there's going to be good They've got classes.

I mean, it's a JRPG.

Yeah.

If you know what a JRPG is and you like that sort of thing, it's quite good.

Is that a bit like a JRR Tolkien?

No.

Exactly, yes.

You should back it on that list.

I know what one of those is.

Yeah, yeah, sure.

Yeah, it's got like different classes, different species.

And yeah, so I'd say I thought it looked pretty good.

The creator he describes himself as more of an illustrator than a designer so as I do find the art to be rather charming especially the little cats they're extremely cute so have a look maybe you'll like it maybe you won't there's certainly some rather nice artwork and assets going on the art style won't be for everybody but if you do like it and JRPG anime style dress not a big fan I like it you can say, And what was the other one, Asher's Ridge, a paranormal drama?

Asher's Ridge.

Yeah.

Yes, yes.

This is by Montfort Tales, who is a name that's familiar to me from seeing them doing various other things.

But where is...

Sorry, I've lost my page.

I can't help you.

I'm guessing it's some sort of paranormal drama.

Yeah, so if you liked The X-Files.

Look, I was trying to do some filler, or else that was all the information I had.

Yeah.

If you liked The X-Files, Twin Peaks, Stranger Things, that's paranormal drama.

And so it's, like, really leaning to, like, the TV style.

Like, it's got sort of an explanation of how to play it, which seems to involve cards and scrabble pieces.

It seems like it's very like a very narrative heavy game like a like what i would call a genre emulator so if you get this game and you like the flavor of that sort of investigation.

Of the paranormal and things are very very weird then you're going to have a really excellent time emulating it not something that i myself would necessarily gleep at but i certainly can see the value of this i i respect it like yeah they've got some really nice uh really nice artwork very quirky yeah i don't know what to say it looks really good yeah um like i recognize a good rpg project whilst maybe not wanting to play it myself but i'm like yeah no this looks good i could see this being fun i might even play it if i saw a convention like it's i'm not rushing out to like buy it but on the other hand i'm like people will see this and will appreciate the joys of it, it can it says you need like a hundred letter tiles so if you've got a couple of sets of scrabble things and a set of poker cards like regular play cards so yeah banalograms yeah so yeah there's a lot a lot of stuff they've got various what you call it videos on how to play and so forth and stretch goals so it's already smashed through most of the stretch goals so you're going to get things like foil details and location and the wrist deck two bookmark ribbons in the collector's edition we love a bookmark ribbon yeah spray book block edges i mean basically this feels like it's going to be a very pleasant physical experience to own this book really high end stuff so yeah.

There we go.

Very nice.

Okay.

And I think we're done there, except to mention our upcoming Kickstarter, Kickstarter even, coming up very soon.

The What's All These New Best Trees, launching Wednesday, launching Jess.

I think we're planning on the 16th of September, but at the moment we're just publicly saying September because we're waiting on some stars to align.

Okay.

But we do have a quick look at another monster.

This is the Fire Dragon.

Rah.

You can see that in close-up on EN World, because that's a bit small and blurry.

But that's the stat block of the Fire Dragon, which is a terrible, terrible monster which will burn you alive and then eat you while you are cooked.

Better known to me as Sir Ruffy from To Save the Kingdom.

Yes, that's a classic sort of Claudio Posa art piece he did for us and we used it here because it's just so gorgeous.

Yeah, because for a different system, why not?

A dragon is a good dragon.

I've actually got that on the wall in my lounge as well, framed, nice big version of it.

Gorgeous.

And if you want more previews of this and you are a press person, if you talk about things on social media or on the internet about tabletop role-playing games and you're not on the press list, send me an email and you can go on the press list and I'll send you some other previews so you can share it with your audience.

And with that i think we're done for the week so we were as always we as always were recording live which we forgot to mention the top but we'll mention at the end and so if next week you would like to join us we'll be streaming live 2 p.m uk time which is 9 a.m eastern time and that'll be on youtube twitch and facebook and you can join in the chat with us and if you lasted the whole three hours and 52 minutes or whatever it was, No, it was nearly two hours, I think, we did today.

It was a long one, very long one.

I cannot wait till I have to go and transcribe it for the subtitles.

That's going to be amazing.

To be fair, we did use the podcast all the time.

We did, but we didn't have to transcribe the subtitles for them because it was just a podcast and not a video.

That's true, that's true.

I can see what my weekend's going to do.

Yay!

Well why don't we leave and get that weekend started yeah let's go and do that we'll speak to you all next week thank you very much everyone we'll see you all next week same bat time same bat place bye bye.

Music.