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...

PJ Coppy from the Southampton Guild of Roleplayers and Homebrew and Hacking, TTRPG Design.

I am, as ever, delighted to be here, but alas, a cloud has passed over the face of the very sun itself, and I'm less bereft.

Bereft, I tell you, because whilst you have the, Excellent quality of your fine Labrador to keep you company.

I do not have my emotional support, Jessica Hancock.

Now, Jess is doing one of those live-action role-playing games, apparently.

I hope she can.

I'll wait for the weekend.

I am sure she will.

She was a little poorly.

I was quite poorly this week, and she was poorly this week as well.

Well, totally unconnected, because I haven't been in the same physical proximity as her for quite a while.

Very insane man, I understand.

Yes, yeah.

So, yeah, she was probably, but apparently she was better and right enough to go and do her live-action role-playing games.

So, a lop, as the kids like to call it, a lop.

Ah, yes.

I remember those.

Yeah.

So, we haven't struggled a long without her.

We've got some news.

We've got some news.

Wow.

Wow, do you know who this chap is?

No.

Who's that?

No.

I didn't think he would, but, you know, there was a chance he might.

That is Sean Levy.

And Sean Levy works at Netflix.

He's producing a television show for Netflix called The Forgotten Realms.

Right.

Which we did talk about at the beginning of the year.

Oh, okay.

Or earlier this year.

but there weren't any details at the time.

But he did provide a slight update.

Oh, I thought of him.

Well, he's also, he was doing the old press junkets for Stranger Things Season 5, which is coming out very soon.

And he was asked about the D&D show, Forgotten Realms.

And he said that the problem, I mean, it is still happening, it is still going on.

But the problem they're having is it's challenging, because what they're not adapting is what D&D isn't, is a story.

It's a world kind of and a rule set for creating stories so what they are having to do is create a story from scratch, rather than I mean everyone goes well there's lots of D&D novels there's lots of D&D adventures you could just use those as the story and that's a fair enough observation I guess, they could adapt the Tomb of Horrors for example yeah yeah yeah I mean I'm not sure that would make for a great story but I don't know.

Okay, hear me.

It's well known for its deep characterization and plot twists.

Look, instead of Ninja Warrior, instead you get a bunch of athletes and you run them through a version.

You spend a couple of million short on the accessories and so forth.

But basically people try and speed run the Tomb of Horrors and try and make it through the various traps and so forth set up.

but it's like Squid Game and the traps are real, no that seems a little grim like seems a little far a little too far i prefer that to people who don't like late stage capitalism and like been terminally poisoned by such things whereas i'm like just have them fall into like a big big old pile of gunk or something like that you know like a gun tank with um what's his face like fun house that's all there you go absolutely yeah sorry Right, fair enough.

Or the crystal maze.

Maze.

Think about it.

It's like, you know, use your wits to solve the puzzles.

And if you don't, then you get guns on you.

The crystal maze, as I recall, and it's been so, so long since I've seen it.

It was basically a series of escape rooms, wasn't it?

Yeah.

Different themes.

It'd be like an industrial one and a fantasy one, or I can't remember what they were.

Medieval, futuristic, Aztec, that was pretty cool.

Oh, yeah.

I think there was always, yeah.

No, I mean, Great stuff.

There was actually, well, there may still be a live version in London, which you can go and read.

I would not be surprised i would not be surprised but it's true i've been there i've got the crystal to prove it as well i went to a war of the worlds escape room in london a few years ago, it was it was big you like most expect escape rooms are quite small, it was that and escape room so basically you'd have an interactive experience and you move to the next room and it'd be an escape room then you move to the next one and there'd be an interactive experience wow and then so it was like a mixture of the two a cheeky sort of like there's like three three and a bit hours long it was quite you're there for quite a while amazing that sounds very cool it's very cool and and some of it was in vr as well which didn't work so well because this is kind of the early days of vr and it's a bit glitchy so some of that wasn't so good yeah but anyway anyway um going back to dnd yeah we have gone way off topic we have gone this guy here yes oh because we were talking about adapting, the Tomb of Annihilation.

Has a potential storyline for the indie show because despite having over what must be the best part of a thousand novels out there there's nothing worth adapting is the official take is that right, I mean that's not the words he used but I guess that is the position they hold because they're not they are developing an original storyline.

That's all I can tell you.

I can't tell you why, but I can tell you that is what they are doing.

So, whether or not it will actually go forward, when asked if the Forgotten Mom series would move forward, he replied, I really hope so.

I really, really hope so.

So it doesn't look like it's in the can.

It's not definite.

It doesn't sound like it's...

There's a lot of potential frictions, because Hasbro will want their IP to look good, but a lot of the things that people associate...

Because they're caught in an interesting position, because the audience for this show, right, it's going to be adults, right?

Like us.

It might be a kid's show, I don't know.

Well, potentially, but if they do aim at a kid's show, it's going to get a lot of flack from the adult nerds who are like, oh, why don't you do a show for us?

Despite fundamentally getting a role-playing game, it's a hobby that does include, and rightly, children.

Not like maybe five or six children.

Historically, that is the age at which people got into the game.

The odd thing is when you see these sort of 50-year-olds complaining that D&D is, like, targeted at teenagers, then you ask them, what age were you when you started playing D&D?

You keep going on about how you started playing D&D in 1974.

How old were you in 1974?

You were not 50.

But, you know, that seems to elude them.

A little factoid seems to escape them.

Anyway anyway a lot of the stuff that they've been bringing out in their books the artwork has been changed um to reflect a a cuter aesthetic i don't think that's a bad thing because like yeah i don't have a problem with cute looking things it might not suit the games i want to run but you know not everything's for me you know um i'm unlikely a game of 2024 for D&D and that's paid.

Yes.

But yeah, I'm a writer again at D&D 24th.

I don't care.

Maybe.

Fair enough.

Well, anyway, that's the news.

Anyway, that is the news.

So, new D&D show, hopefully, still coming from Netflix.

The trouble they're having is that they don't have a story to adapt to just the world.

And it's called The Forgotten Realms.

That's all.

That's it, really.

They got the concept of a plan.

We'd like to do The Forgotten Realms.

Has a family-friendly the gritty drama.

It does worry me slightly.

It was towards the beginning of this year that they announced it.

And if they're still at the point where they're, well, I hope it goes ahead, but we're having a bit of a trouble thinking of a storyline.

I mean, it sounds like nothing's happened in between then and now.

Yeah, like I said, I don't think it's thinking of a storyline.

It's thinking of a storyline that will hit all the various non-stated goals that they all have, which is attract viewers, get people watching like put it this way do you expect like hbo style casual nudity in this dnd show or do you think that would cause yeah i think it would cause the internet to melt down which i would find hilarious um would it have violence would it have blood presumably there's going to be some dungeons mild peril is it going to be comedy like my guess is it'll be similar in tone, it'll be similar in tone to the D&D film the recent D&D film I think, That is my expectation.

Who knows?

That is mere conjecture.

That would be, for us, us personally, because we both like to sit on the wrong seats, that would be a really great outcome.

Is it going to be what Netflix can afford to do?

Is it going to be...

Netflix can afford to do anything they want.

Netflix has a lot of money.

Yeah, obviously they can afford it, but are they going to spend the money on it?

That's a different question.

Like, yeah, we can all afford a lot of things, or some of us can afford a lot of things, like probably you, but not me, I can't afford nothing lately.

But like, yeah, there's a difference between being able to pay the money for it and wanting to pay the money for it.

So it depends on how much of a priority it is.

So I think it'd be great.

I think it could be really great, but we'll have to wait and see.

Yeah, well, fingers crossed.

We can but hope.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Interestingly, this is very much a tangent.

The showrunners, or not showrunners because it was a film, the creative team behind the D&D movie are the people that have been tapped to make the new Star Trek movie, the rebooting Star Trek in movie form.

And the people who made, it was two people whose names completely escaped me, but they will be making the new Star Trek movie.

That's cool.

Yeah.

Anyway, so I'm cool.

Anyway, let's move on to Eberron.

Eberron, Eberron, Eberron.

Board of the Artificer, Artificer, Artificer, however you wish to say it.

I told you before it's Artificer.

Artificer.

Artificer.

Yes.

Yeah, okay, very long.

So that's coming out later this year.

Yes.

Possibly in hardcover format a bit later for us in Europe and Asia.

Because all of the books seem to be getting delayed, all of the official TNT books seem to be getting delayed at the moment for various logistical reasons.

But if you're in the US, presumably in November as planned, that will be coming out.

That's soon, isn't it?

That's soon.

Was it December?

It was December, actually.

Mid-December.

But I don't think here in Europe and the UK will get it that soon.

But anyway, there's an article up on D&D Beyond called What's New with the Artificiaire?

Artificiaire?

I didn't mean to say it again.

I've forgotten now.

Artificiaire.

Artificiaire.

Yes, okay.

Cool.

I remember a lot of goldfish.

I can't remember things for less than a minute.

Don't worry about it.

And I'm not going to go through this article too much because it's a lot easier to go and read it.

Rather than listen to me read it.

And it's not interesting enough.

So basically, it's a list of changes that, with the class.

And most of them are small mechanical changes.

Some of them are bigger, some of them are smaller.

But I will put a link in the show notes so you can pop over and have a look.

But there's quite a number of them.

So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 changes.

There were 12 changes.

Some of them are new features.

Some of them are just mild, highly tweaked features and things like that.

You know, like the Replicate Magic Item feature replaces the old infused item feature and things like that.

Okay.

But, you know, it's basically the whole publicity machine.

Yeah.

But the publicity machine for that particular book is starting to rev up.

So over the coming weeks, I expect we'll be just hearing lots and lots and lots of everyone-based news.

Yeah.

It's fine.

I mean, I've never played in a newspaper, never one, haven't you?

How much are they charging for it?

That's an excellent question.

I'm really glad you asked.

I have an excellent question you asked.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for asking that question.

I just want to spend some time dwelling on how good the question is.

December the 9th.

I don't know.

I do not know.

I'm sorry.

Yeah, because I think it was like $20 or something like that in D&D Beyond, which was a fair chunk of change because there's not that much to it.

So, yeah.

I think it's a full-size to hardcover, isn't it?

It's not a small book.

Oh, is it?

I think so.

I mean, I think so.

I mean, I'm just wondering what they put in it then, to be honest.

Well, the page count.

Oh, no, it's 112 pages, so it's not a big hardcover, it's a smaller hardcover.

I lied.

And it's $29.99.

There we go.

I do know this information.

I was only pretending not to know.

I do, in fact, know that it's $29.99 and it's 112 pages.

There we go.

And it includes the revised class.

Yeah.

Well, I've got a little paper about page counts and prices in a minute, which you'll find interesting.

But we'll get onto that in a sec.

So this includes the revised artificial...

How did we say it again?

I've forgotten again.

Artificiaire.

The class, anyway.

The revised class.

Five subclasses.

Five revised species.

A new spell, new bastion options, and magical inventions.

Three campaign frameworks, and 20-plus new monsters.

Hmm, nice.

So quite a lot of player-facing stuff there.

Yeah, that's quite a bit then.

Okay, but...

Yeah.

We'll find out more about it as time passes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah, there's going to be tons and tons and tons of previews and stuff coming out over the next three weeks, for sure.

That's not the only D&D release coming up.

There's one that, well, I say coming up, Lorwyn First Light.

Has been released from D&D Beyond.

It's quite interesting, that cover.

Because it's got sort of like an elf slash fae reading a book.

Yes, it's a very fae-themed setting.

Right, so then I would infer from that that it's like the fairy is on the left-hand side as we're facing it altogether, all the light and cute stuff, and it's what they call it, the Darklands?

So the Magic the Gathering plan...

It's called Lorwyn Shadowmoor.

Right, okay.

And what happens is it switches between its night and day aspects every 300 years.

Oh, okay.

And it's all very fae themed, so much so that there aren't even humans in it, or at least not naturally occurring humans.

I think humans can visit it, but there's no naturally occurring humans in this setting.

It's all fae species.

Yeah, so this is a digital-only release.

It's $14.99 it includes the Lorwyn Changeling which differs from the Eberron Changeling apparently I haven't bought this so I can't tell you exactly how but it differs from the Eberron Changeling the Rhyme Kin R-I-M-E Kin which is an ice person species yeah, two new Elven lineages, the Lorwyn Elf and the Shadowmoor Elf.

Okay.

And then we've got some feats like Shadowmoor, Hexer, and Child of the Sun.

So that is $14.99 on D&D Beyond.

What I find interesting is that's the third digital only product that's come out on D&D Beyond in the last two weeks.

Oh, yeah.

We had Astarian's Book of Hungers.

Yes.

We had The Fall of Netheril.

Yes, yeah.

We've got this.

And we've got Law and First Light.

And we've got two more downloadable contents from Forgotten Runs, which haven't come out yet.

So that'll be five in the space of about a month.

Which i find interesting very interesting and these are pdfs either these are only accessible on dnd beyond yeah so yeah i mean you know people talk about where it's probably best not to think about buying these it's probably best to think of them as like a medium to long-term rental.

Because Wizards is not good at keeping stuff online.

It's also all about this sort of movement to a digital first.

It won't be digital only any time in the foreseeable future, but a digital first walled garden setup is just getting more and more like that every month.

I mean, you've got to be careful, Russ, about saying that sort of thing because you'll upset immense numbers of Ian Waldreaders because they find that sort of talk very threatening, even when the writing is very clearly on the wall.

Because I think we've been talking about that on this podcast as pretty much an obvious way for Wizards to go for a couple of years now.

I think it's fairly obvious that's where it's going, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't think there's any doubt about that.

I mean, it won't go digital only.

No.

Like, the books will always be there.

Yeah.

But they're getting 50% of their revenue from digital now.

50%.

That's a big old chunk.

And bear in mind, that's 50% of their revenue, which has much lower cost than the physical books.

So presumably more than 50% of their profit.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, you've got, I mean, there's no physical object to faff about with logistics.

There's no stock.

Having a game shop to take their cut.

Yeah, yeah.

There's no stock to deal with it.

It's like, I mean, if you're prepared to stick digital only, then yeah, I can see it.

It's just like, what do customers want?

Well, customers are lapping their stuff up in droves, clearly.

I mean, yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it's not my preference, but...

Maybe it's a generational thing.

Like, the younger generations don't really have the idea of things that they can own because they're disenfranchised.

Well, I think, you know, for me, as you can see from the shelves behind me, as you can see from the shelves behind me, I just love books just as artifacts, just as a collection.

I like owning and being surrounded, you know, like on three walls, they're surrounded by books.

And that is something that I find, you know, comforting, I guess, in a way.

It's just an environment that I like.

I mean, I'm looking behind me.

I have my own horde, has a fellow dragon.

Dragon so um literally piled upon the floor it's uh it's becoming a point of contention so mine were until recently but they've all been sorted now yeah yes by the way i mentioned page counts and prices yes now this little table was made by echo hawk on en world looking at the cost per page apart from the little liner that i snuck in at the bottom there just funny It's funny.

So, as you can see, the Heroes of Faerun and Adventures in Faerun were sort of like six to seven pages per dollar.

Then you get onto these digital things and it drops down to 1.5 to 2.5 pages per dollar.

So the price, the pages per dollar, the price per page basically, is much higher on these small digital things.

And we did say last week that Christian Hoffer's first impressions reviews are things like Asturian's Book of Hungers, because you know it's fine but it's quite flimsy for the 15 price yeah you know you'd rather have sort of like eight eight dollars or something for that for what was in there because to put those word counts into perspective so for our listeners who are not able to see this table you've got like about 11 000 14 000 18 and a half thousand nearly 93 000 and for adventures where you're in a whopping a hundred and forty thousand words a adventurer's lead module which is about between three and eight hours of content depending upon you how you run it yeah that is about 10 000 words so historian's book of hungers is only slightly longer than a like on paper a two to four hour adventure.

I mean, we sell, when you look at things like Insider Magazine and stuff, that is one chunky article, Starian's Book of Hungers.

If we put an adventurer in Insider Magazine, that's about the size of an adventurer.

I think it's actually less.

I think our adventures are 15,000 words.

And we'll charge like $2 for that.

Wow.

And they're charging $15 for less.

Right.

Well, I mean, the price is what people pay for it.

Yeah, I guess.

Then again, you look at our own, well, Ian Publishing's Level Up Adventures guide there.

656 pages for $24.99 in PDF format because these are all, you know, we're looking at the digital here, not the physicals.

These are all digitals.

So compared to the 1.5 pages per dollar that you'll get in Asturian's Book of Hungers or the two pages per dollar in Noreen First Light, Level Up Adventure has guide 26 pages per dollar.

I mean, the money for money there is just, I don't know.

I don't know.

I mean, by those prices, we should be charging like $200 for Level Up Adventurer's Guide instead of $24.

But hey, Helen.

Also, you appear to have frozen, Peter.

I don't know if you can hear me.

I'll continue talking.

Hopefully, you'll reappear.

Woof.

Woof.

Got a lot of good stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

Next, next on the menu, Ed Greenwood.

Ed Greenwood created The Forgotten Realms, and he is going to be publishing four new Forgotten Realms books, sourcebooks, in 2026.

These are the four sourcebooks, Guide to the Dale Lands, Insights of the Dale Lands, The Dells of the Dale Lands, and Adventures in the Dale Lands.

And these are going to be published there's a official site for it over at Myth Makers and these four books will be published on the Dungeon Masters guild, and each of these source books as you can see focuses is fleshing out the Daelands region which to be fair I think a lot of people sort of do say that Daelands is very very much already fleshed out and I would I'm not a big Forgotten Arms fan myself but I would agree with that.

You know, if you're going to pick a region, I'm not 100% sure that's the region that needs it, but that is the region that's being fleshed out here with these books.

So the Guide to the Dale Lands is a regional source book by DMs and players.

Insights on the Dale Lands, well, I think you can guess what that is.

It's geared towards social encounters, and it's not just inns, it also has NPCs, mini-games, festivals and tournaments and things like that, which sounds a really useful book you can use anywhere to be honest, Do you think it's meant to be like a pun?

Well, insights of the Dalelands.

Like, as it's written, it's places where they have fun.

And insights, as in, like, proves about the Dalelands, which can fall.

I don't know, we'd have to wait, really.

It's just like a weird way to phrase it, you know?

It is.

You'd say ins of the Dalelands, wouldn't you?

You would say insights.

Yeah.

Yeah, you're right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If you're listening to this on the podcast and you can't see the screen, when I said that and I said In Sites of the Dale Lands, I bet you thought I said I-N-S-I-G-H-T-S of the Dale Lands, not I-N-N space S-I-T-E-S.

So truthfully clear to those listening on audio only, it's In Sites of the Dale Lands.

But I think that looks like a book that can be plugged into any setting.

That looks really useful.

that's in NPCs, minigames, festivals, tournaments and stuff.

That looks like a generally useful book.

What else have we got?

We've got something to remember.

Yeah, we've got Delves of the Delands, which is a bunch of dangerous locations, basically plug-in dungeons, I guess.

There's a million of those out there.

I don't know.

I find the insights of the Delands more interesting because plug-in dungeons are monster books and mini dungeons there's a lot of those available, I'll point the Adventures in the Downlands there you have and then we've got Adventures in the Downlands which is an anthology of adventures for levels 1 to 12 oh okay yeah, So these are going to be quarterly in that order, quarter one, quarter two, quarter three, and quarter four, in the order they're shown on the screen there.

So four of them across 2026, penned by Ed Greenwood, creator of the Forgotten Realms.

It's going to be fun.

I don't know how rules-heavy they'll be, whether they'll be more just prose describing the realms, whether there'll be lots of rules I couldn't tell you, lots of player-facing content i couldn't tell you i guess we'll find out yeah um well it's hard to please everyone uh like i would expect there to be a mix of some player-facing content in each of them because that's what drives sales because like there's like what about one on dms for every three to eight players right so players will often want to pick up the stuff with information relevant to them, and rightly so.

So I'd expect the Ventures in Dale lands, maybe they've got something shoehorned in there, maybe they don't.

But what I'm quite disappointed about is the lack of high-level support.

This game has 20 levels in, and there's one book and one adventure pathway which gets past level 13, so yeah, it's all great.

Yeah, but that's been a long-standing thing with 5e generally, isn't it?

I don't think you could point the finger specifically in these books about that.

It's just a general thing.

I mean, is it like the cart before the horse?

Is there no high-level adventure support because people don't play high-level adventures?

Or do people not play high-level adventures because there's no high-level support?

It's hard to say.

Yeah.

Like, well, I know that people do run high-level adventures.

I know that people talk about it.

And it's one of those most frequently asked questions.

How do I do it?

How do I run it?

Yeah, like, it's hard to do, but that's why we have game designers.

But what I can tell you from a commercial point of view, what I can tell you from a commercial point of view, having been selling D&D content for 26-odd years, high-level adventures are hard to sell.

They don't sell.

Really?

The low-level adventures sell, I mean, by an order of magnitude.

Like, adventures in the sort of 1 to 5 region will sell 10 times as many as one in the 17 to 20 region.

Right.

So the incentive to actually produce these adventures isn't there.

Because even when you do produce them, people don't buy them.

Not on mass, anyway.

Wow.

Not in large numbers.

Yeah.

Wow.

I mean...

As the problem is even worse for the venture parts.

That's standalone.

The problem's even worse with adventure paths because adventure paths, if you're going from 1 to 20, for someone to buy those levels from 18, 19, 20 adventures, they have to have gone through the whole, the number of people that start a 1 to 20 adventure path, get all the way to the end and buy the level 20 adventure is vanishingly small.

It's like less than 1% of the people that bought the first one.

Less than, one in a thousand, I think.

So that's the behind the scenes kind of commercial side of it, they're hard to sell, really hard to sell.

Okay, yeah.

I mean, you are looking at like, probably at that point, about one and a half, two years of play, assuming it would be consistent.

That's a long time to keep a group together.

Yeah, yeah.

Low level adventures are where the money is, unfortunately, so.

That's what it is.

You know?

Yeah.

Anyway, It's a little, slightly depressing note there.

Yeah, it would be nice if there really was a market for high level of entrance.

It just isn't there.

Right.

You've frozen again, and it's your news topic next.

Something called Story Goblin, and I don't know what that is.

It's a...

Right.

Yes, moving on.

Here we go.

So Story Goblin.

It's my news topic oh yeah it's a cute little web app that I online basically the idea is that.

You've frozen again, Peter.

I'm going to move on to one of my news topics.

I think you can sort out your own...

...having a bit of connection issues, but what we've got after it, we've got a cute little app which lets players all pick up...

When they're playing online, Story Goblin will essentially take all the chat and the various bits and pieces that go into...

Your online session, and it will compile them into, like, a text dump, and let you extract the information from it to...

And we've lost Peter again.

Okay, so, um...

Let's move on.

The Mighty Nein, this is an interesting news story, because the Mighty Nine was available.

This is interesting.

So, um...

You can't watch this, but Mighty Nein was available on YouTube until November the 16th.

It was the first episode in the new Critical Role TV show, which is going to be showing, I believe, on Prime Video.

So they put the first episode on YouTube for about a week, last week.

Unfortunately, you can't go and watch it now because it's no longer there.

But if you did catch it, I did not.

if you did catch it you could have watched the entire first episode from what people are saying it is less action comedy than the legends of Fox Machina, it's a little more it's a little more character driven I haven't seen it myself but it is going to be I think it's probably this week it's hitting prime, so if you want to go and catch up with that you can't watch it on YouTube anymore the video has been removed as of November the 16th but you can go and watch the first episode.

The first few episodes of the new show apparently serves as a prequel to the events of Campaign 2 of Critical Role, or The Mighty Nein, providing some sort of origin stories and what the characters are up to ahead of that campaign.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

So yeah, check that out on Prime Video.

Amazon Prime, or Amazon Video, or whatever the head is they call themselves these days because it seems to change constantly.

Well, it's Amazon Prime, but they started putting ads in, so they wanted to charge me the best part of £100 to watch ads.

So I was like, no.

Every single one of them has done that now, pretty much.

I think only Apple hasn't.

Or Netflix.

I think it does Netflix.

I can't remember if Netflix has or not, but only Apple hasn't.

In the chat, Rai Alboa says, the first three episodes of Mighty Nein is streaming now on Amazon.

So there we go.

You can go and watch the first three now.

Thank you so much.

Let's know.

So this one might interest you.

How to Dungeon Master Parenting, a guidebook by Shelley Mazanobel.

Interesting.

Game of mind, a child-bearing quest, leveling up the things and raising future adventurers.

All right.

Yeah.

Equal parts funny and practical.

this is like a core rule book for raising kids.

Yes so this is Shelley Mazzanoble, how to dungeon master parenting a guidebook for gamifying the child growing quest leveling up your skills and raising future adventurers it's basically humor comedy and advice.

She covers a wide range of topics so the starting equipment you need put together your adventuring team which is sort of, you know, the support you need around you for this quest that you're going on, I guess.

Your DMing style is kind of like your parenting style.

How to gently, secretly steer kids towards better decisions.

Whether you're parenting at first level or a parent with a few years under your belt, there's different useful information in there.

Sample ability score checks for common encounters.

Things like trying to hold a cranky baby take their temperature open a bottle of baby medicine with one hand that sort of thing, tricky skills tricky skills yeah yeah it's a bit of fun it's a bit of fun with some with some useful advice and they're definitely as, Rye says in the in the chat definitely a Christmas list item yeah by that for any parents that you know that, I'm also basically D&D players.

And perhaps I'll even have time to read it.

Yeah, perhaps.

Maybe she kept the audiobook or something.

I don't know.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, yeah.

That could be fun, yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway, should we go back to your news items there before you got cut off?

So the first one was this story goblin thing.

If you could tell us what that is.

Oh, yes.

Apologies for listeners who I'm going to repeat myself slightly for.

Hopefully this will upload but perhaps it didn't who knows essentially story goblin is for online games it's a free app storygoblin.com and it takes the chat and all the messages and so forth that's been sent and our amalgamates it into a big text dump um which all the players have access to, and then you can use that to create a recap.

So that everyone's on the same page.

So if someone's taking lots of notes and someone, hi, has taken very little, then it's a good way to help catch them up if they don't remember.

Very cool.

Very cool.

I mean, I thought it was just like a little thing, but I thought it was, you know, a nice novelty for people doing online games.

And the other thing, this is fun.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I saw that and I thought, well, As soon as I saw this, I thought, Russ is going to want to get in on this.

Have you seen the price of it?

Maybe not.

Maybe not.

Maybe not.

But tell us, what is this?

What we are looking at, general listeners, is a relatively old-fashioned writing desk, nice and wooden and so forth.

It's got various little pigeonholes for stationery, a couple of drawers.

But this one is quite special because this writing desk used to belong to J.R.R.

Tolkien.

It's now, it's going to go up for an auction at, I believe, Christie's.

Christie's, yeah.

Which is an auction house in the UK, and they estimate it will make between £50,000 and £80,000, which is the thick end of, what, about $100,000?

Yeah.

More or less?

Depending.

So, yeah.

Exciting times.

Yeah.

So this is a late 19th century Merton College desk, and it's part of Christie's doing this Groundbreakers Icons of Our Time auction.

So this isn't the only thing that's on there.

They've got lots of interesting things on there.

They've got things like 1932 Annotated Draft of the London Underground, for example.

The first edition of Alan Turing's On Computable Numbers.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And also perhaps for gamers, the original art for the first edition of Warhammer.

Mmm, mmm.

Nice.

I think it is.

Bear with me one second.

If I'm not mistaken...

Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho.

Is this?

Grabbed it off his bookshelf.

Yeah.

That's the box set.

Oh, nice.

And I think that's the first...

I think that's the art they're talking about, but the actual original piece of art.

How cool is that?

I don't know how much that will go for not as much as Tolkien's desk it's interesting looking at the three white books inside there, this is the first tabletop game I ever owned this is before I had D&D it was this game.

And, you know, it's got Volume 1, Tabletop Battles, Volume 2, Magic, Volume 3, Characters.

And this is the very first ever Tabletop game.

My dad bought it to me when I was, when I started secondary school.

So it would have been, what, 11, I guess.

And I took it to school and we opened it up and tried it out at lunchtime at school.

And that started my, I know someone bought in D&D.

So Nick Hartley, I think his name was, bought in D&D.

like a few months later and said, let's try this one.

And then we tried D&D.

And that was a role-playing game.

But the way we'd been playing Warhammer was as a role-playing game, almost by mistake.

I mean, it's got characters right there.

So yeah.

And obviously, if you have never seen any of it, so you don't know it's supposed to be an army's war game.

It's like...

Yeah.

I mean, that's how Well, team mail to DMD is like a well-known story.

So, you know.

Yeah.

So I guess I have my dad to thank for my career, for my hobby, not just my hobby, but my actual career.

A job Russ's dad.

Yeah.

And I imagine that was such a random gamble, but I tried buying this for his birthday type affair.

There's no way anyone could have known that it would grab me the way it did.

I mean, it was clearly...

It's got like some sort of fantasy stuff on the front.

Russell probably liked that.

And that has proven, to be fair, a fairly reliable guide ever since, judging by your bookshaves.

Yeah, but I didn't give all those books then, did I?

I mean...

No, no, but you presumably had some sort of interest in Robin Hood and so forth, and running around the new forest and so forth.

Lord of the Rings, yeah, I guess, yeah.

Back then, there wasn't much else.

You know, Lord of the Rings was the big fantasy book.

There wasn't...

There wasn't...

There wasn't...

There wasn't...

There wasn't...

You know, none of that stuff existed.

He's got you Lord of the Rings got you Seminarians got you Hobbit got you Wizard of Brissing Mane Moon of Gromorath Wizard of Arcee what do we get look this will do this will do, and there you go and it stuck so good job yeah, Yeah.

Right, the final piece of news we've got this week is another one from you.

October 25, TTRG Crowdfunding Retrospective.

Which you put up there.

Yes, yes.

This is a fairly data-intensive blog post, which is, as we know, always amazing for podcast listeners and so forth.

I don't have an image because it's basically just a page of text.

But I'll put a link in the show notes I mean but I'm taking a punt here that the sort of person who's listening to a TTRPG podcast might be, a bit of a nerd and we love you for it and we appreciate your support because we are also as you know giant nerds and we do love some numbers especially love some numbers and this one is.

Ttrpg-spider.blogspot.com um they were having a look at uh back a kit game found and kickstarter uh to get the raw data 100 and they're specifically focused on ttrpgs of which there were 181 um 65 distinct systems 24 original nearly all of them on kickstarter i know kickstarter was having a good month yeah, 157 of the 181, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, these numbers are hard to argue.

157 Kickstarter, 17 on back here.

They've raised, what, 7.7 million?

Yes.

7 million, yeah.

Well, I mean, nearly 8, but 7.7.

So it's a lot of money.

Big chunk of change.

Accessories did very well.

Adventurers did very well.

Advice did very well.

Audiobooks, campaign settings 15 of those turned out.

One platform, apparently.

There's some reprints, supplements, systems, and translations, which is pretty cool.

Supplements is the big one there.

63 supplements, which is over twice the next highest thing, which is Avengers at 30.

Yeah.

Avengers and accessories, they're tied at 30 and 29, respectively.

Those are big.

And you've got campaign settings and everything else trailing along at the bottom.

So, yeah, supplements, which, you know, can't argue.

That is my entire output uh has a uh ttrpg author under my own label so yeah makes sense to me um yeah like lots of different systems of the campaigns uh about 43 percent were for dnd5e and they raised about three and a half million which is 45 percent of all the money raised in october they did identify that 50 campaigns uh which is about one in four raised just under 200 000 yes uh which was 2.51 of the money and of these so so of that 2.5 um well sorry what did I say?

It's a 29 D&D campaigns, which was 36.25% of all 5e crowdfunding.

50 campaigns used AI, which is about 1 in 4, and they raised 2.5% of the money.

So, to me, that says that AI is not that big a deal.

Yeah.

So it's 28% of campaigns raise 2.5% of money.

And that 28% were using AI, or admitted they used AI.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what do we think that shows?

The backers don't value AI?

Is that what that shows?

That they don't think it's worth putting much money into?

What conclusion could we draw from that?

Well, I'm not a statistical expert, but if you've got 28% of the total campaigns that are going out there, and only two and a half percent of them raise a money i would expect that these are very low value campaigns um and that several of them were maybe unsuccessful and yeah that is i suspect probably due to the perception that generative ii produces low quality work that's of course.

Solidarity amongst creatives and so forth because it turns out the people who create the things that we all love and enjoy tend to be quite influential and when they're all saying pretty much with one voice, we hate this stuff, it's stealing our work and making us sad.

Often their fans will listen.

But that is entirely inference on my part.

I do not know for certain, but I will say that if you've got only 2.5% of your money is related to AI, then you probably don't want to use it.

It doesn't seem to be an indicator for success.

Whereas if you were doing D&D, then you're looking at about 45% of all the money raised in October.

And if you were using AI and D&D, then you have about a third, 36% of money.

So it seems like it's popular amongst 5e designers.

Ooh, so there's a higher number, so 27 or 28% of campaigns overall used AI, but 36% of D&D 5e campaigns used AI.

So the D&D 5e creators were more likely to use AI than the other creators.

Yeah, yeah.

It feels like that.

I wonder why that is.

Yeah, I wonder why that is.

That's intriguing.

I can't.

I don't really.

Again, I don't know.

I could speculate.

There is a belief that I often see espoused online.

I don't hold it myself because I don't think it's accurate.

But the D&D is regarded as almost a separate...

and we're talking like 5e D&D specifically, is regarded almost as a separate hobby from TTRPGs.

I'm not sure I'd give it that much credence, but...

Right, right.

Could that be because there are way more AI D&D?

Yes, that's the same question, just refreshed.

Yes, why?

The answer is why are there more AI D&D creators than AI non-D&D creators?

Skill issue?

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

There's a barrier to entry.

Like, if you don't have discriminating consumers, and they're just buying what it says.

If they're not part of the wider ttrpg sphere which many people aren't like we're extremely online you run a website for the forums and we're doing ttrpg news so as people then you might not know about the problems of ai oh no like in the in the general public general public is generally in support of ai mainly because i don't think the general public really knows that much about it, I think they just think oh it's a cool useful app that I can have on my phone that will do something funky and that sort of thing and that's basically all it is to them yeah but for a lot of people that's it because that's what they've been sold it as yeah.

And the rest of us who do not have multi-million multi-billion on our advertising campaigns are trying to push back on that but it's hard because people don't know.

And some people just don't care either way so yeah The other stat on here that I thought was interesting was the geographical stats.

Yes, yes, that was pretty good.

So if we look, 87 in the USA, 29 in the UK, 13 in Italy, and presumably lower elsewhere.

So they were the top three.

So 87 in the USA, 29 in the UK were the ones I wanted to drill into there because there were basically...

Two and a half times-ish, not even quite that, as many in the USA as in the UK.

However, the USA has a population five times of the UK.

So the UK is overrepresented by about twice as much as it should be if you just went by population numbers.

For some reason, the UK is punching above its weight in terms of numbers there, and I wonder why that is.

I think in many ways it's, easier to work on ttrpgs in the uk um because like it's easier to get a game going it's easier to do everything because we're not so geographically dispersed like this is going to be very unpopular i know a lot of americans aren't geographically dispersed they live in great big enormous cities like new york and los angeles and chicago and you know yeah but it's like it's i feel it's like a lot harder for them to like get together it just seems to be like they have to, meet and work online a lot more whereas like it's much easier to do in-person stuff in the uk, like i i've heard of relatively few ttrpg clubs like outside like they're scattered across the uk but i don't really come across them like people talk about their stuff online so maybe that's just because I'm not looking in the right places.

I don't know.

It's not something I follow.

I don't know.

It just seems to be just a little bit harder.

Maybe it's based around friendly local game stores.

I don't know.

The US certainly has more game stores.

That's a fact.

Proportionally, not just as a flat number because obviously they're bigger, but proportionally they have a high density of game stores.

Maybe that's what that is.

I don't know.

I don't know.

And something else which you bear in mind is that, We've got like 129 campaigns there with the UK, USA, and Italy of 181 campaigns total, of which the vast majority, like what was 150 odd, were run on Kickstarter.

And as we know, Kickstarter actually has a very tight geographical emissions system.

True, that's going to skew the stats, yeah.

it's going to do it towards if we're going to go all Cold War and that's quote First World unquote countries, because a lot of horror countries don't just aren't allowed to be on Kickstarter for whatever reason yeah.

Okay right I think we're pretty much at the end of the show now, I just want to say the last thing there isn't going to be an episode next week we won't be here next week because Jess and I will be going up to Dragon Meet, and if you are at Dragon Meat in London next Saturday we're going up on the Friday which is why there's no show, and then setting up and then the event is on the Saturday, if you are in London next Saturday the 29th I believe that is the 29th please do pop into Dragon Meat which is at the XL in London this year, don't go to Hammersmith and over the hotel it's the wrong place you need to go to the XL yeah yeah Which is in East London.

Wrong size.

Yeah.

And yeah, we'll be there.

We'll be there.

Come and say hello.

Come and say hi.

We'd like to see you.

It's only a one-day thing, so we'll be back by Sunday.

But yeah, I always really enjoy Dragon Meat.

I find it quite a cozy convention compared to Q3 Games, it's very big and bright and noisy.

Covenous.

It's in the aircrime numbers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I mean, Dragon Meat might feel more like that now as in the Xcel.

I don't know.

It is apparently about twice the size as it was last year.

To full Wi-Fi I've heard from people talking about it.

Oh no, that's so bad to vendors.

I know, right?

Because you need the Wi-Fi for payment systems.

Yeah.

That's always a problem.

It's like, it just seems like a really obvious fix that they could really help out their paying customers, you know?

Not the venues.

And Excel has conventions constantly.

You would have thought that would be an ongoing problem every single time.

I guess it's we don't really care because where else you go hold your convention ha ha ha the NEC ha ha ha yeah, alright anyway so on that note we won't be here next week but we will be back all three of us shall be back the week after in two weeks ago so we'll see you then we're gonna go and have a weekend now okay bye bye alright then goodbye everyone thank you for joining us see you in two weeks All the time.