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

I am Russ, aka Morris, or Morris, aka Russ.

And with me this week is...

PJ Coffey from the Southampton Guild of Roleplayers, also from homebrew and hacking TTRPG design.

Russ, even after 370 episodes, I am still delighted to be here.

And joining us also yeah i know i know it's a it is wild but there we go i join us also a titan of the gaming industry a sharp-eyed sentinel over the stewardship of dnd and some say fond of animals that hang upside down from branches some call in the lazy dm others slightly foolish but to us it's the one the only the absolutely unespaulable it's mike shea hello oh it's funny i was thinking jess had changed i think jess had done something with your head.

Hello mike how are you i am well how are you guys we are great it's halloween it's halloween today we're all playing i'm off out to a halloween party this week we got any halloween gaming planned yes weekend yes i'm running my annual halloween ravenloft game using shadow dark tomorrow with i think two people three people i've played with two people i've not played with before um yeah so i try to i try to bring a group together that i haven't played with anywhere else to enjoy a ravenloft shadow dark game a time a timed game you have three and a half hours to collect the items before stradge shows up and kicks your ass.

Sweet it's nice are you going to use are you gonna have switched lights off and have everyone use like little torches that would be fun no probably under lit under under their chin right torches pointing out illuminating just they literally get one hour yeah one hour candles to look at their character foods and in the dark they have we did do one one Halloween years ago we did do um.

It was outside it was actually quite warm for for October for some reason um around a campfire at once yeah really really cool that's fun yeah i wouldn't do it this time though it's so cold anyway anyway um so i've had an interesting week i made a very poor life decision i know i was following it on the young world do you make good life decisions for us i'm occasionally name okay okay um like tell me more so you are aware that i have a number of uh tabletop role playing games have won the shelves behind me oh is that what those are the last few years they've been very very disorganized this and look at basically the awful organization awful looks good to me existed this week i mean this is just like things higgledy-piggledy there is no sense or order to it i mean there's a couple of sections there's a dnd section and bits and pieces but generally speaking it's just things just crammed in there where they'll fit they're on shelves i don't know what more you want yeah right those look pretty good frankly so i decided they're not in boxes or piled up on the floor the camera is saying focus on me we're not looking anywhere else in the house well i i made i made the very poor decision to try and reorganize their shelves this week.

And I have spent days, days.

I thought it would take me an hour, maybe.

It has taken me days.

And literally, at the moment, I mean, you can't see it properly behind me.

It's so much better than it was.

But I'm still almost sort of knee-deep in books at the moment, all over.

You can't see the floor of this room.

But when I try and walk out, I'm like stepping from one little island of carpet to another, trying not to walk on piles of books.

It's, it's like a bombs hit this, like it's horrible.

It's horrible.

And I'm still not finished.

Um how are you organizing them alphabetically by i know it's well you know you know by spine color well yeah spine color was one yeah by color that's the way i did i did consider organizing them by page count i thought that would be a fun way to square root of page count but the heavy ones at the bottom and then way up but what i've generally done is apart from some um exceptions like dnd has its own section because it's such a big section and then i've got a pathfinder section and i've got a section of um another up stuff because that's a big section because you know obviously i publish it so i have them all um generally i've gone for themes so i've got a star trek section so it's got some of the diffuse star trek there it's got some old um faster star trek it's got some other bits and pieces then i've got like a superhero section with like two or three old 80s superhero box sets and some mutants and masterminds and you know loads of things like that so i've gone with themes generally um i've got a sort of a 80s licensed box sets you know i've got like the james bond and the indiana jones and the dallas that everyone keeps commenting on yeah things like that so i've got so i've got a section of box sets i've got like seven or eight of them that are just these 80s licensed ghostbusters um and things like that um 80s licensed rpg box sets mainly in terrible condition and taped up to keep the boxes in place but But, you know, I've got a set for them right now.

So that's kind of the theme I'm going with.

Yeah.

It's working so far.

I mean, it's actually funny you should mention that, because obviously I immediately think of the A-team.

I think of A-tees, like TV tie-ins.

And there are people playing role-playing games today who do not know where the face character comes from.

So there we go.

I don't think it's like it.

I think the term predated face in the age of...

Really?

I think it did.

I wouldn't swear to it.

I wouldn't swear to it.

But I think it did.

What do you reckon, Mike?

Because he was the face man.

I don't know.

The term face man.

He was called Face, wasn't he?

Yeah, he was called Face, short for Face Man, because he was the face man.

Yeah.

Right.

But the call of a face man predated.

It's an actual name.

But his actual name was Templeton Peck, wasn't it?

That's his real name.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway.

You have well outstripped my knowledge of 80s.

Okay.

80s TV minutia.

Okay.

But anyway, my next stage, when I've got it all done, the label maker is coming out, and I'm going to label the shelf, with the different section names.

And this is for most of my regular books as well.

So I've got a whole TSR D&D fiction shelf over here to my right with some Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance and stuff like that out there.

And then I've got a general fantasy shelf and then I've got a Tolkien shelf.

So I'm going to label all these shelves because at least in my head, that means once they're labeled, I won't put things that do not match the label on that shelf and that will keep them organized.

I was just getting asked for a library card it sounds like a sounds like a library organization which I'm all for maybe I should just use the Dewey Decimal System for my books instead can't recommend it.

One you'd have to learn what the Dewey Decimal System was big problem and two it would all be the same number, the Dewey Decimal System doesn't go down deep enough basically yeah I have a question for both of you do you call your libraries do you go through and say like okay these are out now and i'm gonna give them away or yes and no duplicates i have a crate of duplicates in the hallway out there which is a massive massive box and it's probably got like a couple of hundred books in it now enormous i don't realize how many duplicates i had some of them are duplicates of things that i i made myself and they're proof copies and things like that yeah yeah sorry i don't know if you count those but i've got so many things that somehow i've acquired twice over the years and i don't know why So I've moved those out so that there's space, but I view my books and my games as a collection.

And when I collect something like someone who collects stamps or rocks or, or Funko pops or whatever it is you collect.

I don't get rid of them.

I keep them because they are, they are the connections.

You know, I'm proud of the collection.

I like sitting in here surrounded by my books.

It's just.

Yeah.

Oh, I, I have no problem being surrounded by books, but I, I, I still, yeah, I, I call mine.

I will, you know, once or twice a year, usually before a convention that I'm going to, I go through and read through them all.

And if they don't spark joy.

Pulled off the shelf and i donate them i can't do it yeah even books there are books that i will never read i'm like there's a cookery book up there i will never read that book well and the problem was like at some point you might look and be like dallas rpg that's ridiculous and then later you're like man i really wish i kept that dallas rpg like it was one of a kind do you know i am so glad i kept that that's where i could see the calling being a problem but like i i'm not a huge pathfinder nerd and i but i but i played a bunch of pathfinder at a point and i had a bunch of Pathfinder books, but I'm like, I really, at this point, the only ones I'm ever really going to touch again are maybe the core books just for like a historical look.

So, you know, I kept a handful, like five or six Pathfinder books, but other than that, I have.

I have a fellow Dallas RPG owner.

There's more than just me.

Wow, there's two copies.

Guildfast there in the chat.

Wow, there were two of us in the world that own the Dallas RPG.

Oh, speaking of cool collections, can I share a thing that I got to witness with my own eyes?

Of course so i was at game hole con uh about three weeks ago and had the opportunity to go to the actual game hole uh that the game hole con is named after which is the the the the owner of game hole con uh has a uh a loft above a restaurant that he owns where he plays rpgs and he has a i believe it is a collection of every single dnd product that has ever been made is in that one place he also he was the one that that managed i don't know if you remember at gen con there was It's like the D&D Museum.

And that museum was his, right?

That was his, I believe it was his job.

And he was the curator that stayed there and talked about, So I met him and I talked to him and I said, what's your favorite thing here?

And he said, probably that.

And he pointed at the ceiling and on the, on, on kind of the angled ceiling is the original forgotten realms map drawn by Ed Greenwood.

So it is the one that Ed Greenwood drew in Canada and sent sheet by sheet to Jeff Grubb.

Very, very cool.

And it's one of a kind.

And he said it was literally fished out of the trash.

Like he didn't fish out of the trash, but it was rescued during that.

I was half expecting you to dare to say the Dallas are beating.

There was the Dallas.

no he did not that did not count as every dnd book plus the dinosaur page i did the funny thing is i had heard him on a on a uh podcast uh before i this was last year when i went where he said he had everything but the monstrous compendium because he hated the monstrous compendium the second edition ad and he hated it because you can never organize the binder right yeah and and he had a good reason which was when they later put out new monsters for you to put in sometimes the monsters alphabetically would be between a single page yes couldn't yeah you couldn't so there was no way to actually yeah yeah because yeah it was a double-sided so you have one on one side yeah so then i thought i'll be funny and then i'll meet him and i met him and i said hey you know where's your monstrous compendium and he gave me this like deadpan look and reaches over and pulled one off the shelf he's like i ended up having to buy one he's like i couldn't not i couldn't think not having it too much of a completist right so i had to buy it even though i hate it i'd love those things i i wish they still did that yeah i'm good you know i don't know i'm i wasn't it you know it's an interesting idea but i'm i'm happy with our current bound books better right i think we should probably get cracking with some dnd news.

Because we've got a bit to get through.

And then we've got, later, we're going to be talking about the New Forgotten Realms books, which Mike has right there.

Wow.

Pretty shiny books.

They're pretty.

I got the special edition covers in my local game shop.

I think before we do that, though, let's talk about...

Now, do you say Sigil or Sigil?

I would say Sigil.

We could go back to the 1D&D video and listen to what they called it.

When they were so excited about it.

I'm not going to call it Sigil, just to be contrary, but you feel free to call it whatever you wish.

However, we don't have to call it anything much longer because it has finally been laid to rest.

So as we know, back in, I think it was March, Wizards had a big layoff.

And amongst those people, about 30 people, 90% of the Project Sigil team was laid off back in March.

But they kept a small handful on for sort of not a lot of work, but I guess maintenance, just keeping the servers running and doing tweaks and stuff, I guess.

So they said at the time, the phrase they used was, we are sunsetting active development.

Which I assume...

Not a good sound.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That was back in March and, you know, they laid off 30 odd people.

As of this week, they have announced that Project Seagull is going away for good.

Finally put it to rest is no longer is kick to the bucket is an ex parrot as they say i think one of the interesting things about that period of time after they laid off the 30 the 30 staff was they were still marketing it on their dnd beyond marketing emails and they were still putting out miniatures and they were free they were like hey we have a new mind flayer or new you know um you know your new mind flayer mini or new mimic right we have a new mimic and they called them literally unpainted minis because they were just the gray they didn't have any color texture to them and you're like it's a virtual it's a virtual mini but i was like why are you blowing your marketing real estate on this at this point and i guess it's like they had the models and the models are in some pipeline or whatever um but that was really the curious bit was like they continued to promote it with with new quote unquote unpainted minis after they fired 30 people and you're like what are you doing like i guess they were trying to like you know shock it to light with the pad well i i gotta say it's like um like whilst i'm obviously half of people who've lost their jobs because you know it's like they yeah they just try try to do their work it's a yeah yeah and i'm sure they were very passionate about it yeah on the other hand i am also quite relieved personally because i regarded project sickle has one of the biggest threats to.

Tabletop role-playing games.

It was never a threat.

I could give you one good reason why it was never a threat.

Everybody at the table had to have a $2,000 laptop to play.

Oh okay yeah well there was no risk of this hurting that you know that was the issue right like now if you want to the rpg industry dnd beyond now we can have a conversation i mean that is also that is also something yeah i i i do sort of agree with as well yeah so it was not a threat all right like so if it had had low i mean i didn't look into the specs but like the concept of like a gaming place that it's basically it's hasbro it's got huge amounts of capacity could have been bad.

But yeah, if you need like a really high PC, it's not going to get off the ground.

So yeah, if you, I mean, if you were, if you were worried about, you know, as, as I sometimes, dictate on the centralization of the rpg hobby around a single publicly traded company dnd beyond is the thing to worry about they actually they have you know according to my own thing about about a third of of the rpg players and dms that i that reach my stuff are on dnd beyond way more than sigil ever was right yeah i mean people always get like really upset when i talk about monopolies because they've got this really strange understanding that i'm not a terrible game peter it's just the worst board game ever it is a terrible game so when you've only got.

You only need one company and that's the only company and that is the only possible monopoly where it's like if you've got like a company with like eight with even like as much as 12% of the market that has a monopoly.

I mean I know that but it's like every time I mention it people get upset and I don't know how much the market dnd has but i'd say it's a lot more than 12 i can assure you i know right yeah when they make a decision everyone else is sort of caught up in the riptide, yeah yeah it's a whole other conversation the good news is to me the monopoly has a floor which is we have the system reference document and we have physical books and as long as we have all those things there's only a certain amount of control that they can pull over the hobby in general because yeah lots and lots of people are still playing with old versions of dnd and certainly lots and lots of people are playing with other rpgs completely so and get download your pdfs back them up uh you've got that 321 thing that you've mentioned yeah the 321 backup yeah you listen to my show i do listen to your show my wife is like are you seriously going to spend a segment of your show talking about backups i'm like i am because it's important it is important, yeah anyway if we get back to project sigil slash sigil um so um it's still going to be available up until the end of october 26th, So it's going to be around for another year, yeah, before they turn off the servers or whatever it is they have to do.

But those people who have used their subscription in the last six months will get a six-month credit to continue using the platform.

And they said, basically, all you have to do is to have logged in once in the last six months and you'll get that six-month credit.

Okay.

So, you know, I guess.

You also, if you were, if you were one of the people that pre-ordered the core books, one of the little throw-ins for that was a gold dragon miniature, uh, file that you could drop, that you could have in your, in your sigil VTT.

And they said, everybody who got that will instead get a new virtual set of dice.

My, my little funny quip was, Hey, here's this digital thing that we can take away from you and we will replace it with another digital thing that we can take away from you later.

So, but whatever.

I guess actual set of dice.

No, now we're talking real dice.

Now we're talking real money.

Yeah, a lot of people are very comfortable with the concept of renting things electronically when you're pressing a button marked by.

And to me, those concepts are distinct, but I guess that's just me showing my age, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, that's a whole conversation in itself, but...

Another kind of interesting thing going though isn't it it's not just dnd is it it's everything i know but we could stop here.

I've stopped using amazon kindle and moved over to kobo yeah because amazon have said yeah um you're not allowed to yeah you're not allowed to download your books so it's like i never downloaded my books i wasn't going to and then they're like yeah you can't now i'm like okay that's that's a really worrying so i luckily got i got warning before they were doing that and downloaded all of them i had about 300 books that i that i downloaded um yeah the other thing about sigil that's kind of interesting to me is that tailspire is a 3d virtual tabletop that was on um steam you could buy it on steam and i think it was like uh i think it's 25 a client so again pretty expensive because like every single person needs to spend the 25 bucks to have their local client of course it's you know requires a full computer to run and um you know but they were there before sigil started and they're still there now so they you know they survived this whole thing and seem to have a business model that is lucrative enough to continue to fund kind of a similar about as close as we're going to see to what sigil had so i thought that was kind of interesting yeah um.

How would you use that maps implementation is quite slick yes i'm yes i am impressed by their maps and yes implementation of the dnd beyond even though we've just been saying we you know we think dnd beyond is not necessarily a positive thing on the industry side i've got it i can't give them yes to say that the implementation of that is it's really good yeah it is good we said it was a massive danger to independent gaming russ yeah and the better it is the worse said it, they're the greater that danger.

But I mean, I'm not saying it's a deliberate evil scheme.

Yeah, it's like, it's just, in many ways, a company is doing its best to look after its customers.

What I really kind of dig about.

Sorry but i really dig about that what i think is really interesting is the idea that in hasbro they allowed two virtual tabletops to be developed at the same time for this i found that so odd as well and and you know every you know pencil-headed executive i you know i can imagine would be like no we're only doing one and we're going to do the big one because that's the moonshot and and that's where we're going to make billions of dollars and they could have killed a small one and instead they allowed development of both and then in the last quarterly earnings call at hasbro they mentioned maps not only like the ornings calls rarely mentioned d and d ever but to mention not only d and not only d and beyond three in september that's why and that drove traffic to gmg beyond up by 50 apparently so yeah that's what they said yeah so that that good good you know a smart a smart move for them to hedge their bet with their own lightweight vtt that's very good right and certainly it's well integrated with all of other products like they're in a spot where you know if you buy a if you buy a an adventure on dnd beyond all the maps all the tokens everything are already all set on maps that's a yeah it's a powerful powerful draw yeah well anyway anyway anyway we move on from from project sigil slash sigil um do you remember the cover the cover art of the 1977 holmes boxed set, the indie homes i do it wasn't it blue yes no yeah okay yep.

A classic piece.

The cover art was by David Sutherland, and it features a red dragon, a wizard, and a fighter, as you can see there.

And a company called Sirius Miniatures is producing metal, not plastic, miniatures based on classic D&D covers and artwork.

And the first in this series is this, the cover of the Holmes box set for 1977.

Oh, going the wrong way.

and that is what the miniatures look like okay you can see is is the dragon i can almost taste the lead rust i can almost taste the lead this is zinc alloy it's not truly authentic if we're not getting poisoned by it yeah yeah yeah we're not we're not using lead apparently for for reasons who knows why no no lead um who can say why yeah um yeah so these are made from a zinc alloy um So this particular set will cost you $49.95 in those American dollars.

First in the series.

I don't know what's coming next, but that's the first in the series.

They do look kind of cool.

And I like the feel of lead miniatures more than I do the feel of plastic miniatures.

They've got a heft to them that makes them feel more real.

I don't know.

That's less like disposable toys, which the plastic miniatures...

It gives them certain graphs.

It gives them plastic miniature aside.

Goodness.

like that is a whole conversation about plastics that is just waiting to happen but let's not because it's just been me talking uh but yeah it's kind of interesting it sort of feels like um uh selling nostalgia but for a time that never happened, so i know that sounds like a really weird thing to say but like this is that to me this picture here looks like these are miniatures that i'd have expected to have been bought out but to the best of my knowledge.

I don't think anyone ever did.

I was going to say that description you made, you could say about the OSR.

I mean yeah i'm i'm trying to avoid the death threats mike but if you want to then that's by the way don't uh for the record don't put my email address on the podcast if you would oh no no i put your phone number mike oh my god no don't text me, yeah sorry website so i'm gonna say i have your website up it'll be fine.

Yeah um yeah but i do think they look quite nifty these i'm i'm i'm not interested i am interested to see what what they plan to do what the whole series is going to look like and i mean i'm not sure i spend 50 on them if they because what would i do with them, yeah i mean you know it's a bit it's a bit dear for three minis you know i yeah i think it's really more like and those are those are normal mini size minis right yeah well that red dragon is 75 millimeters so yeah that's not very big i mean it's metal what are you gonna get yeah yeah i i mean i think it's really more like a collectible like for an art project say so what you do is you get these you paint them and then you put them in like a little.

Which recreates the original cover i don't think you use them just as like general fun and games minis because as you say they are for that yeah like if i mean 50 will buy you a lot of, plastic nice uh more modern looking models and yeah like just wild numbers of plastic feels like feels like fewer and fewer these days that's true that's true i was getting for a quarter a piece back you know 20 years ago inflation i know oh yeah like yeah yeah i do keep on buying box of skeletons the problem with this sort of thing is i would never paint them i don't paint many so i've got no interest in do it no no skill or ability to do it and no interest or patience or desire to do it.

So, you know, I buy them and they stay silver.

They never get made.

Perhaps they are not for you, Dennis.

Who can say?

I still like the idea of them.

That is the thing.

I like the idea of them.

I just won't put the effort in.

Oh, I see many things, which I think are lovely, but I'm like, would I have that in my house?

No.

So, there you go.

I painted minis and I really enjoyed it.

I should get back to doing it again.

It was a wonderful hobby to get away from a screen.

i don't understand you do i just yeah that put on a podcast paints and minis a really good time yeah it's just like it depends what you're doing like some of it like the i think there's different skill flaws like um i was not a good painter i'll tell you that but i i i gave up for a long time because i was just terrible at it and then i found like the contrast paints like you can get Citadel Contrast or the Speedpainter ones, I'm just like, oh, okay, now I spend an hour and I've got a really nice-looking Mini as opposed to an hour, and now I have a Mini that looks terrible and it needs another four hours.

A little bit of ink washing, a little bit of dry brushing.

Everything looks great.

Yeah, basically.

Sounds hideous to me.

Sounds like the worst time ever.

It's quite a satisfying watch today.

Maybe I'll bring some paints around your house for us and we can feed them to the dogs.

He's too busy reorganizing all his RPG products.

Figuring out where the hell...

One day I'll finish this project.

It is getting there.

Yeah.

Anyway, miniatures, if that's your thing.

I am, I'm going to admit, I am almost tempted.

Just because I know I wouldn't paint them is the only reason I probably won't pick these up.

But they do have an appeal to me.

yeah good job uh have either you checked out the new unearth arcana i don't know i not i don't know the practical answer is well that's more so um it came out this week it brings back five subclasses oh okay and there's some real real poetry going on here because they've renamed a couple of them and the one that caught my eye caught everyone's eye, guess what they've renamed that the warrior of intoxication monk, yeah right we all it's all like biting into a lemon what i can't get is i can't understand, why i mean i can get that you're like hey you know having a character class that's built on alcoholism maybe that's problematic the answer isn't we'll just rename it but still have a character built on alcoholism right like maybe the interesting thing is the previous version didn't actually require you to drink alcohol but the current one does.

So they might have taken the reference i don't know does this mean i can't have a meth-fed monk is that what you're saying russ right you can you peter you if you want a meth-fed monk you i'm not your dad i'm not telling you what at level six i think you're able to strip wires a lot more effectively so that's obviously a key surplus feature anyway but yeah okay a warrior of intoxication it's a terrible name you're you're required to drink alcohol now just stick with if you're going to do it stick with drunken master well you have the ability to create drinks which when you drink them you get abilities so i don't think you're required to drink alcohol but it's not like a potion yeah i was gonna say then shift it to like an alchemical monk right i know right, yeah i'm chemical monk that's something that i'm like okay tell me more.

Oh my god because then you get into like the witcher right now you've got sort of like the witcher style of oh yeah drinking your concoctions and whatnot in order to boost certain things so like yeah there's something there that maybe doesn't have to involve getting faced before you're gonna get into a fight but uh yeah i don't know i don't i don't have a high in intellectual investment value in it, either way.

No.

Well, the other ones we've got, the path of the ancestral guardian, the barbarian, uh, um, some last has been renamed path of the spiritual guardian.

I don't understand why he needed renaming.

The spirit guardian as well.

Spiritual guardian, yeah.

Oh, spiritual guardian, right.

Yeah, a path of the Storm Herald, the Cavalier Fighter, and the Oathbreaker Paladin, which is what we got the picture of up there now.

Oh, okay.

I've got to make the Death Knight-looking chapballs.

Well, then there we go.

Yep, that is a Oathbreaking Paladin.

Ah.

Why is it so nice to leave in the air, though?

All right, never mind.

normally these a lot of the time these um you can kind of half predict a book that's coming by looking at them like everyone's figured out dark sun's coming next year because of the recent psionics and the one that had all the um preserver slash defiler themed magic yeah yeah yeah and special druids and stuff yeah yeah yeah so that made it really clear that the dark sun is is on the menu is coming soon um but this one is just a bit of a mix really i don't it doesn't point to any particular campaign setting or anything like that to me it's just five five yeah you know, subclasses sanathar's guide to everything's greatest hits remixed or something yeah well four of these came from sanathar's and um the fifth one is the earth break where does that come from that's a play of sandbook dmg i think it's not play of sand i think it's dmg i'm pretty sure you don't have Ophrey Capaldon in the or not in the 2040 but maybe it's in 2025.

Fair enough.

I don't remember the book well enough.

It's been a very long time since I've opened the 2014 D&D players handbook I could say.

Oh why would you?

Very long time.

Yeah it's a lot a lot of good stuff there it's undervalued i was just thinking in the day about when was the last time i actually bought a dnd product like an official dnd product a lot of third-party stuff and i've generally found the third-party stuff i just find more interesting, yeah yeah on the kickstarter and i'll go wow that's a good idea that's twist that's a, you know it's third parties just take it in directions but dnd you know i had some i had some extra time on my hands this weekend and spent some time on the uh excellence uh rpg community website known as en world and uh over there the guy who writes that i completely yeah he's a little, sketchy but so far i've never heard of it you know what are you gonna do where else are you gonna go uh so uh there was actually a pretty good conversation about you know.

You know as as the threads do on the end world spawned into different kinds of conversations but one of the conversations was whether or not we should be expecting innovation to be coming out of wizards of the coast or not and my argument is like you cannot expect and you know big innovation to be coming out of wizards of the coast because their goal is to be building off of they're the only one that has to hang on to a 50 year old brand and legacy with whatever they make where everybody else could be like yeah we're not doing ability scores ability scores are done we're just gonna have ability i agree wizards shouldn't be taking wizards have to Because they risk alienating.

That's right.

And they have.

They have taken big swings and it did alienate their audience.

But there's also to say, well, they have tried some new stuff.

I'll talk about the new adventure formats in these books, but also Bastions is an example, Renown is an example.

And then people go like, well, is that really innovation?

Are they taking other ideas?

Yeah, of course.

And they're like, sure.

You know, that's how the stuff works.

Everything's built on something.

But it took them like five years to put anything about safety tools in their products, right?

Like it took them forever.

Yeah.

I often get into arguments with friends of mine who are like, oh, Wizards is leading the way in the RPG community.

I'm like, no, they are not.

They are followers.

They are deep followers.

And then when something is popular enough that it grows enough, like safety tools, then they'll reluctantly put it into a book, but they are not the one out in front.

But I think probably in any industry, I reckon if you looked at, I'm not an expert, like the automotive industry or any industry, I reckon you'd probably find the most innovation is happening with smaller companies.

Yeah, right.

The big dogs are, you know, are much slower to react.

And for good reasons.

Right.

It's not like they should be, you know, experimenting constantly.

Yeah, I don't necessarily hold it against Wizards that that's the case.

Right?

Like, I think, as you said, like, in the times where they tried, I mean, I think, not to get into, you know, I already made the OSR people mad.

But fourth edition, one of the big things, and Rob Hainesville, the lead designer of fourth edition, said, like, their orders from Wizards was, we need to make a new version of D&D that's going to resonate with people who are playing games like World of Warcraft.

So they went in a very different direction and it did alienate a lot of their old users.

So that's an example, you know, for good or ill.

A lot of people still love 4E.

And that was a criticism of the game that was often looked at, which is, this game feels like playing World of Warcraft.

It's like, yes.

Yes, no.

That was the point.

Rob didn't actually play World of Warcraft.

A lot of the things that are in it seem similar, but weren't specifically designed around Warcraft things.

Yeah, yeah.

but it's like it's a concept sure sure yeah i am yeah i hate for me i mean i didn't spend much time with it to be fair but i didn't hate it i spent a lot of time and i was happy to move on and i'm and i like the i like the the successor to foray which is 13th age right made by rob without the bounds of a big publicly traded company sitting on top of them along with jonathan tweet the lead designer for third edition.

It's a fantastic game.

I'm actually doing a, because my life is not complicated enough, I'm actually running Star Trout number in one week and 13th page in the other week just on a rotating basis.

Yeah.

It's great, isn't it?

It's a good game to do for that because Star Trout number, it's a big sandbox.

You do the creation, you set, 13th page, it's like, if you need inspiration, you roll the icon dice and see what happens.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm waiting for the physical books and then I'm going to run it 13th age like the new there's a new 13th age too and yeah and and i'm waiting to get the physical versions of those books but then i'll probably run it in my one of one of my groups yeah yeah this is actually part of my this is actually part of my plot which is to get them invested in the 13th age and say but you have a new edition yeah.

What's the status of the new edition at 30s they had a pdfs are out yeah so the book is done the pdfs are out i think it's in printing right so right um it should be i don't know sometime in the future we'll receive the books um pell grain's great and i love them they they're a little long on their development times for for books and for kickstarters i think uh 13th age the glorantha version of 13th age was like a six year like a six year book okay um but yeah but i i haven't really dug in deep again because like i'm not you know when i have the physical books i'll be more invested in it, but, um, yeah, if I was, if I was excited and it was in it six years since the Kickstarter, I would be tearing my hair out.

Me too.

I don't know how I can cope with that.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, Into the Motherlands is pretty much in that sort of development hell.

And I think the third edition of Exalted, that was a long time coming.

Yeah.

And I think that can be a problem because you sort of run out of all the sort of like something catches people's interest and by the time if you wait too long then they just sort of have moved on, like emotionally.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Talking of Kickstarters, incidentally, since we started talking about Kickstarters, I was going to move us on to the Forgotten Realms book next.

But let's make people wait a bit longer for the Forgotten Realms and stick with Kickstarters for the moment, because there's a couple of Kickstarter bits of news, which is quite interesting.

So let's hit those quickly.

So the first one is the Gygax Memorial Table.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Now, this is interesting because last week when we talked about this, they were really struggling.

Hugely ambitious goal.

It was trending towards $50,000, $53,000, I think it was.

And it has a goal of $150,000.

It just wasn't going to make it.

Yeah, yeah.

Sadly.

It was not going to make it.

But there's been a bit of a turnaround this week.

It's coming in.

I think it's literally finishing about now, in fact.

Because when I looked this morning, it said four hours.

So it could be finishing about an hour, any minute now or something like that.

But this is fun.

So this is what's happened.

There's been a sudden, and I've never seen a Kickstarter graph look like this.

There is a sudden, massive increase in the final few days.

And this never happens.

This never happens.

This is so unusual, so unusual.

I was like, what's going on?

How is this even possible?

And why don't my kids do that?

Can I, can I, can I, do you, do you know?

I have looked into it, yes.

Because I have a hypothesis.

I have a hypothesis.

Oh, what's your hypothesis?

I will give my hypothesis and then you can tell me if I'm wrong.

That at least one or two individual members put a lot of money towards it, including somebody that might be connected to the project in order to get the funding over the goal so that they get the rest of the money.

So you are basically correct.

So the maximum you can put in is $10,000 on a gift card.

You can't put in more than $10,000.

I didn't know that.

So it took seven of them.

And I think I have a, yeah, this is the daily.

So you can see like a few days ago, it just suddenly started to take off.

Oh yeah, I have eight of those.

Eight of them now.

So, if you have a look at that, there's eight there.

And that little picture there, you can see two of the backers there, the tiny little avatar.

I don't even recognize that one.

That is Peter Atkinson.

That is the founder of Wizards of the Coast, who obviously sold Wizards of the Coast back in 2002 in Hasbro.

Oh, a lot.

$5,000.

And so from seven other people, we don't know who they are.

I can't make out who that other little avatar is.

So at the last minutes eight people suddenly threw in ten thousand dollars and it's pushed it over the edge it's just made it yeah it squeaked over the hundred and fifty thousand dollar target and he's well it's 195 now so wow excellent okay yeah it's more than that way over yeah yeah does that mean they've met some of their stretch goals that would be a bit more than a table and a couple of benches uh i don't think so no i think the next stretch goal was considerably higher than that.

Right, right, right.

Um, cause there were stretch goals went up to a million, didn't they?

Just under a million for the full, the whole, if I, if I flip back to the picture with the, the.

Final thing which was because the the picture for those listening at home is um a table with some uh benches by the side of it and it's got like a looks like a little battle map on top and there is a i presume a bronze cast on top and a bronze figure of gary gygax sitting on the throne was really running the game yeah but that was for the full stretch goals that was like nine $1,150,000, I think.

Wow.

So basically for $150,000, it was literally the table and the benches.

There would be no bronze map on top of it, no throne, no statue.

Literally just the table and the benches.

I mean, it's a lot of money.

It is a lot of money.

It is a lot of money.

Oh, but they've made it.

You know, we'll get the table and the benches.

Not that, you know, I don't see it because, you know, it's 3,000, 4,000 miles away from me.

No, you can see pictures.

It's fine.

I can see pictures of it, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, you know, congratulations to them.

You know, good on them.

I mean, I don't know, I don't know why it was that seven people just swooped in at the last minute.

Maybe they were just holding off to see, I don't know.

Or maybe, maybe the people running the campaign were courting those seven people.

Yeah.

I mean, that's what I would do.

Right.

It's like, go, go specifically to the big whales that, you know, are out there who have a big connection to this and say, you know, maybe offer them something that's outside of the Kickstarter in order to do it yeah maybe maybe yeah i don't know i don't know yeah we'll see when we when we uh when we get the final thing we'll find that instead of a statue of gary gygax there's a statue of peter atkinson yeah peter atkinson yeah oh that's how they did it no i doubt that very much but um, you know i'm happy with them i'm glad they managed to do it i it caught me by surprise i was not expecting them to do that you know it really really did not look like they were going to make here okay and i've never seen i've never seen a kickstarter graph looking like that oh i mean if people drop 80 people are always welcome to drop 80 000 into my kickstarters, yeah i'll take it i don't know just you know it depends on what they want for the money i mean 80 000 $80,000 it's negotiable i would rather not yeah.

You see, if it had been just like one person suddenly showed up towards the last minute and dropped in a massive load of money, I could see that.

It's just like seven, eight of them did.

It's all at the same time.

And it's like, wow, okay.

Didn't see that kind of thing.

One person, you know, can come in and screw the graph up and make it an unusual graph.

Good on them.

Talking on successful Kickstarters, we've got two new members of the Million Dollar Kickstarter Club.

And those two members are Void C, which is Eldritch High C D&D Hy-Vee supplement, which is squeaked in.

It's 1,068.

1,068,001.

$1,068,001 Is it $68,000?

It is $68,001 Because on your picture you've got $60,000 Yes, I clearly That's right $68,692 Good for that, So this one was by the project creator is VoidC That's the first one too It kind of is but basically that's a placeholder name for a team-up between three different pre-existing project creators, and those are Loot Tavern, who, you know, they've already had a couple of million-dollar kickstarters.

They're not new to this game at all.

And who are the other two?

Let me have a quick look.

I had it in front of me two seconds ago, and I clicked away from it.

It was careless.

Yeah.

Archvillain Games.

Mm-hmm.

And Titan Forge.

Mm-hmm.

So those last two haven't had a million-dollar Kickstarter, but Newt Haven has been involved with a couple.

Mm-hmm.

I don't know.

Well, they filled my feeds with advertising, so that was really well spent.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I assume they used a backer kit, advertising thing no maybe no i assume well they have a very good they have a very good average pledge of 200 bucks i know i know i know that's the well aggressive that's well you know you get it's got dice and yeah stl files and all kinds of all sorts of things you know me and jess have said many many times you know when we thought should we do all that stuff and try and make go for a really really big kickstarter because that is the way to get a big kickstarter you've got to have all that add-on stuff and you've got to get that average pledge level yeah i think uh on my million dollar kickstarter club page where i track all of this, for a million dollar kickstarter the average pledge level is let me just quick look um 115 dollars.

If you look at all the, uh, 48 million dollar Kickstarters, um, that I calculated quite a while ago.

I think it may have gone up a bit since then because you've had a couple of really big ones that have really, really expensive pleasure levels.

Uh, and this is one of them.

Um, but if you want, if you want those big ones, you've got to do, you've got to have the miniatures, you've got to have the dice bags and the dice trays, and you've got to have the t-shirts and the hats and the pigs and the badges and the, you know, you've got to have all that stuff, but you've got to then produce all that stuff.

Yes.

Which isn't all going to be produced in one place, like if it was just books.

It's going to be produced in different places.

You've got to bring all that stuff together and coordinate it.

You've got to get someone doing logistics to do all of that.

All of that stuff is not tariff exempt or duty exempt or tax exempt because it's not books.

And if you're importing those into the US, which you probably are, I mean, you might not, you might be making all of that stuff in the US, but I'm going to guess that you're probably not.

And plushies and bags and satchels, all the stuff that you do.

All of that is going to be hit by probably china level tariffs it's probably made in china maybe not i don't know but it's going to be hit by it's going to be an you know i wouldn't want to be, doing the logistics to fulfill a kickstarter like that at the moment i'm sure it takes a take a braver person than me to tackle that i feel that it's like a lot of scope on the micro end micro creator end of things where you have like someone who makes ctrpgs and someone who make stuff for ttrpgs to work together and actually produce a kickstarter where they tap into both audiences people who like ttrpgs from a creator and people who likes buying stuff and getting together and then yeah there's a lot of responsibilities the chat says these minis are going to cost a huge amount to produce and then the tariffs are kind of yeah it's basically what i just said but um yeah i wouldn't i wouldn't i wouldn't want to do it um and also you know, I don't know what the profit, what the, what the margins are on those sort of key stuff because I've never really tried to do it because it, you know, it's...

So it's a hideous-looking task.

With minis and stuff in plastic, a lot of it's like the initial setup, so you do have to have that huge source of front-end investment to make it worthwhile.

Once you've got them, then your individual cost per unit is very large.

It's not that big, the front-end.

So if you're looking at a million-dollar Kickstarter, you're talking a few thousand, but out of a million-dollar Kickstarter, it's not to get the molds done, which is the costly bit at the beginning yeah you know if you've got a ten thousand dollar kickstarter yeah it's it's expensive if you've got a million dollar kickstarter it's a it's a bit of those pennies to you um but you know it's adding all this stuff together and then the tariffs and just just the shipping just the shipping i mean i god i'm trying to think we.

Imported void runners codecs into australia the uk and the us and that is a big heavy box with a lot of stuff in it which is why i'm using that as the example as a component comparison because this these sort of things will be fairly sizable chunks of it's gonna be quite heavy the shipping cost is gonna be and the shipping cost is just stupendous i mean you're paying to ship it from the manufacturer to port and then from port to your warehouses, wherever they are, um, play tariffs or customs at the point of entry.

Then you are paying to ship them individually out to the individual customers from your, uh, from, from your, you know, uh, distribution hubs in whichever, whichever regions you're, you're doing that from.

It's just the money just mounts up.

It's so much money.

It really is.

And it's not fun.

It's not fun at all.

But anyway, by the way, the other one is the Fabula Ultima TTRPG.

It's the sort of Japanese role-playing game-inspired, kind of Final Fantasy-inspired.

It's a JRPG tabletop.

Yeah.

I thought it was out already, to be honest.

This is like a sort of Ultimate Premium Edition with their new bestiary in it as well.

Oh, okay.

So you can pick it up already.

So they're doing sort of a mothership thing where they sort of released it, got loads of people playing it, and then they do a Kickstarter to get even more people playing it.

Yeah.

Well, this is like a collector's edition, I guess.

Oh.

Because the four rules are out.

A celebration edition, it says.

How exciting.

Yeah.

And that made 1.6 million.

Nice.

Which is pretty good going.

So that is two more.

at these million dollar Kickstarters, which means if you look at my graph, the million dollar tabletop RPG crowdfunding campaigns over the years.

You can see the 2025, the first half of 2025, I thought was a massive, massive, um, drop i thought we weren't gonna weren't gonna see many at all but it looks like i'm sure got three months two months two months left of the year it looks like it's gonna edge out maybe 2024 because free league will have another big one they always run towards the end of the year um without fail so i think we're gonna have eight or none this year as well yeah it's a little bit of a small data problem right because like you're talking about 10 11 7 8 like it only takes one or two to skew your whole result so it's interesting now it is it is it still does follow a curve i mean obviously to 2016 to 2020 you know doesn't fit this same model where covid times were really good for the rpg industry yeah right and then covid times have not been as good for the rpg industry no um, Yeah, 2021, when there were $11 million table-to-part BG crowdfunders.

After it's changed from lockdown to non-lockdown, yeah.

Right, yeah, yeah.

And I mean, almost every publisher, big and small, that I talk to that's willing to share any kind of numbers at all, says it's about a 30% drop in revenue since COVID times, and I experienced that myself.

I wouldn't say it's all due to COVID.

I think there's other factors involved as well.

Like, especially if you're in the 5e producing market, I think 2024 was a hit.

Um, both from the production point of view and from just customers just being careful because they were like, oh, this is an addition of D&D coming out soon.

A, I'm going to wait and see what that's like before I buy anything.

Cause I don't know whether what I buy will be compatible.

Um, B, my gaming budget is only X.

What am I going to buy this year?

Well, I'm going to buy those big three hardcovers from Wizards.

Right.

You know, so those are two other big factors, especially for those making 5e stuff, where, you know, we've noticed a drop.

So we've been to those three things, really.

The OGL thing affected it a bit, too, but...

Yeah, not as much.

Not as much, yeah, yeah.

So four things, those four things.

This is a bit like Spanish Inquisition.

Five things, no?

Yeah.

So, what's that, that's about 20, 30 Kickstarters.

are the majority of them D&D.

You should look at my million dollar kickstarters.

Maybe I will.

So, okay, let me tell you.

So, there have been 48 in total.

Million dollar kickstarters.

26 of those included minis.

Miniatures.

43 of the 48 included additional merchandise, pins, t-shirts, dice, trays, that sort of thing.

37 of the 48 included dice.

Of the 48...

Only two did not include miniatures, dice, or merchandise, additional merchandise.

Two ever have done that.

And I think that was Shadow of the Dark and Quixote and Crow are the only two that have ever done that, including any of that extra stuff.

Nobody else has ever done that.

Impressive.

Of the 48, 27 are D&D fighting related.

However, it's worth noting that the top four are non-D&D.

you.

So the top are Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere RPG.

Which tapped into a considerable existing audience.

I think I was comparing it to various militias and armies in the world.

I was told legends well known to those of us who will look at cartoons.

Yeah, the Gloomhaven Grand Festival.

Which I still say was like a reprint for a board game with like a little little peach RPG tapped on the top with a bit of sellotape, you know.

It was quite a hefty RPG, but okay.

And also, the MCDM RPG.

Those four are the top four and none of those are D&D.

So while the majority are D&D 5e related, the majority of million dollar ones are, the top four are not.

Yes.

11 of the 48 are based on an existing IP, not counting D&D.

um that'd be like a movie a book an older game edition or something like that um only out of the 48 only four of them are completely original properties.

Like either they're either not 5e or they're not based on an existing ip yeah only four of them that's the telling thing only two don't include minis dice or merchant, merchandising and only four of them are properties so what that's saying is to do a million dollar Kickstarter.

You need the miniatures, the dyes, the merchandising, and it needs to be 5e or an existing IP.

Interesting.

Or you need to get very lucky.

I mean, it is possible, but you need to get very lucky.

And 5e isn't that actually that's from a predictor has some of those other things you mentioned, like having them physical merchandise does really boost those pledges.

It pushes the average pledge level up.

That's what that does.

And what you need is a high average pledge level if you want to make a million dollars.

You need to be sure.

Yeah, and one of the plus.

Right, and that's because trying to get the good return on ad spend for paid advertisement, you have to have a product where you're making like a hundred to two hundred dollars you know because if you're at fifty dollars you're just not going to get the same you know facebook has learned how to keep squeezing every dime out of out of ad revenue and they have made it where now the only way that you're going to actually make money on the ads that they post is if your average pledge is you know over a hundred bucks.

Wow oh that yeah my experience like that you know perhaps legit man the majority of our The average pledge level is probably one hardcover book, probably the average.

So you're talking 50 to $60 ish, maybe a little higher with add-ons and stuff, but the add-ons are books as well.

They're not t-shirts and anything like that.

Um, so, you know, when you, when you're doing something like that, there's just no way just you're going to make a million dollars.

Well, well, I say that too, people did.

Yeah.

Dark and, um, um, creative and craft.

So it is possible.

It's just very, very unlikely.

Which are also not D&D, are not existing intellectual properties.

D&D-ish, but yeah.

Yeah, I can see it.

It's not a 5e D&D, which is what we were specifying previously, but yeah.

Yeah.

The other statistic was the average campaign does, at the time when I did this, it was 26% of its funding in the first day.

It's a little higher now.

It's closer to 30%.

So basically you can look at a campaign.

After its first full day, and by that I mean the first day that kick track tracks, because, you know, with time zones and stuff, the first day could be just like three hours if you're in the wrong time zone.

But the first full day that kick track tracks, um, and multiply that by three, you can probably, you know, that's the region you're going to get.

And that pretty much holds pretty consistently.

The only thing that breaks that is when people do early bird stuff which massively front loads a campaign and what you'll find is they might have up to 50% of their pledges are going to be in the first day or when they do those um uh so they've got the early bird stuff and there's some rewards that are cheaper if you come in earlier or so you get the early bird stuff whereas if someone comes in early in the first 48 hours or whatever first 24 hours they'll get a free miniature or they get a free whatever that really stacks it towards the front as well.

But uh most campaigns without without that early bird stuff basically 30 percent is what you're going to do in your first full day and that's pretty consistent like it the stats just don't really deviate from it yeah um yeah i've always found that when when we're predicting our own kickstarters i have a whole spreadsheet of every single kickstarter that we've run and i put in the number of pre-launch followers we got just before we launch so we know what that is i'll put in what the art we expect our average pleasure level to be um and i'd track what we do in the first hour the first day the first 48 hours that sort of thing um and basically after the first day i can tell you where our kit starter is going to end pretty much without pretty accurately pretty accurately much more accurately than kick track does or backer track or any of those things to give you these wild numbers i can just look at it and go well i can tell you that's going to do 80 grand right now I know solid yeah.

Anyway.

Okay.

Let's talk about those forgotten rounds.

Oh.

How I said, let's talk about it.

Well, I mean, is Mike's going to talk about it?

Yeah.

Because Mike has the books, whereas we do not.

I do.

What I do have before we start, though, is a quick glance at the table of contents.

Oh.

Which was posted online.

And we do have a first impressions review from Christian Hoffer up on E&M World as well, which you can take a look at.

But I guess the table of contents is exactly what you've got in front of you there as well, Mike.

I do.

So where should we start?

So we've got two books.

You mentioned to me before we started that you've paid less attention to this player options side.

Yeah, I didn't dig into the subclasses and spells and sort of the mechanic-y bits.

I was more interested in how much lore and general coverage of the forgotten realms that it had okay they have um so you just for a context point of view are you a historically are you a forgotten realms fan are you someone who knows a lot about the forgotten realms because i not at all i yeah i would i definitely put myself i definitely would define myself as a fan of the Forgotten Realms.

I would certainly not say that I am deep into the total knowledge of the realms.

Like, I mean, I've been playing in the realms for whatever, 30 some years, right?

My first campaign when I was 14 was in the Forgotten Realms and with the old gray box.

But, you know, I'm not a.

You know, there's lots of little specific things that I miss from time to time.

But I love all that lore.

Yeah, I mean, my background is, I've never played in the Forgotten Realms.

Maybe once or something that I don't remember.

I've got a couple of Forgotten Realms books, but it's never, I was always a Dragonlance fan as a kid.

That was always my go-to setting.

And then after that, I was always a home-go guy.

So when it comes to published setting, by no um osmosis i kind of know a certain amount about the world nowings but i've never gone out of my world today i need to delve into it in any way yeah and that that's actually one of the problems of the realms that many many people bring up even to the point where it is addressed in these books which is the you want to gm the realms but you don't feel like you know enough about it and or one of your players knows more about it than you do and both that is almost certainly going to be the case.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That is, that is something they directly address in these books.

Like it's, it's a, it's a situation that they bring up and they give the common advice that you would expect to hear, which is it's your world.

You can make what you want of it.

So if you don't know any details, you can fill in your details.

And if you have somebody who knows more about the realms, you can tell them a, the realms we're playing here is, is our realms, not necessarily the realms that you know.

And I'd like to tap into your knowledge for things that I might not know.

And those are very common refrains for the what do you do when you want to play in a setting where you don't know it particularly well.

And you might have a player who knows it better than you.

That's about as good as you're going to get.

And then the rest depends on your player and how well you can work with them and not constantly get that.

Well, actually, that's not...

Yeah, I mean, that depends very much on the nature of the player, doesn't it?

And that year, Ned for the Anzen was in a different state.

They have a, you know, Gonf Bay and Ray was a different Archmage.

Yeah.

Well, I suppose from our point of view, that is like a little bit of a problem.

I guess from the player's point of view, they're like, well, while we...

Why are you saying you're getting forgotten around if you're not going to use the forgotten around at all right right right yeah so anyway let's take a look at these books then so so mike what's your sort of like overall quick sort of yes i have a good my overall takeaway is uh they're really good for i like them a lot um they're also really expensive for what you get oh um if you recall and and i can dive into both you know dive into both of them but the the expense one is a consideration because um if you recall a year or so ago maybe a little bit more than a year they said hey because of you know lots of things going on in the industry we're going to have to increase the price the standard price of one of our hardcover books from 50 to 60 right there was that happened about a year ago and then of course what was interesting is the core books came out and they were $50.

They actually kept them, but even though the page counts on those books are much higher.

So this one, you could say, okay, well, one of these books is $50 and the other one is $60.

So it's $110 for the total set.

My feeling is both of these books together are one book.

Right?

They feel like one book.

Are they very light?

No, they're big.

I mean, this is the interesting page count wise, they're getting close to 500 pages.

Word count wise, they're about the same as like Eberron rising from the last war as a single volume.

And they have fewer words than the original campaign setting guide from third edition D&D.

So, and that book, if you increase the price of that book to inflation, with inflation is about $72 or $73 today for the amount of total words that you're getting.

That means these books aren't 20% more expensive.

They're actually 100% more expensive.

Who's this?

Some Jessica.

We've been randing up and randomly sold.

Who's this?

Who is this person?

My God.

Asking questions about Baldur's Gate 3.

Right.

Coming in from Facebook.

This is really interesting.

It's too bad Jessica's not on the show because I would have, this would be a contention to debate, which is, oh my God, Baldur's Gate again?

Thank you.

How many times do you make me buy Baldur's Gate?

Obviously, there are some people who are like, I want to know how much Baldur's Gate 3 stuff is in there because that's what I really care about.

Baldur's Gate 3 has turned into a drinking game here now.

Every time Jessica mentions Baldur's Gate 3, someone has to take a drink.

The answer to her question is, yes, there are references.

There are additional references in the cover.

There's a good picture of Gortash, one of the three villains, spoiler, Baldur's Gate 3 spoiler.

One of the villains in the video game is Gortash.

and there's a really cool piece of artwork of Gortash in it.

What's interesting is all of the, since we're on that, we'll jump to that one piece.

So there's three, there's five main focus regions covered in the Adventures in Faroon book, one of which is Baldur's Gate and one of which is Icewind Dale.

And those, when I heard about them, they bothered me because I'm like, oh my God, I literally bought two other Icewind Dale products in the last 10 years.

Legacy, the Crystal Shard and Rime of the Frostmaiden.

I've already played two full campaigns, three, sorry, three full campaigns in Icewind Dale.

Wow.

In the last 10 years.

I don't need more Icewind Dale stuff.

I want Thay.

Where's Thay?

Thay hasn't been touched in second edition and it's a...

I assume it's all Sword Coast stuff.

Focused unusual is it no no that's very interesting there's a heavy focus on the sword coast but what then this is where i go like also i think it is it is inaccurate to say that this book by the way the covers are beautiful the special edition covers at my local game shop and they're beautiful so there's a heroes of faroon book and there's an adventures in faroon book yeah and it says on them dungeon master expansion and player expansion i think that's not accurate these These are both Dungeon Master books.

It happens to be that the player one has character options in it, but that one has an atlas of all of the realms, not just those five focus regions.

And it's 80 pages long.

There's an 80 page section of this book that covers every area of the Forgotten Realms, right?

So that makes this book more of an overall gazetteer of the Forgotten Realms than the other book, which is the GM book, right?

Which gives me this, like, these two books together are one, really one volume.

And if you're a GM who wants this, I can't imagine not buying both.

And I can't imagine they're thinking a GM isn't going to buy both.

They feel like one book.

Another weird one, which I mentioned while we were on break, the hero's book is the one that includes the map.

There's a tear out for an entire giant Forgotten Realms map.

New Mike Schley Forgotten Realms map.

And that's not in the GM guide.

That's in the player guide.

Isn't that weird?

Yeah.

I mean, I love having maps as a player, but I would say I need them as a GM.

Yes.

In the Forgotten Realms as a setting, would the average person who lives there be aware of the geography of the entire...

I seriously doubt it.

It depends on where you go.

if you go to water need to talk into a sage probably but if you're about like a farmer outside of phandalin yeah i wouldn't think so right no of course not yeah i wouldn't yeah um anyway i think they're really really good but i do think that the cost especially in today's you know turbulent economic times is something to consider uh because you know you're paying 110 bucks in my opinion for one volume it's a big thick volume with a lot of stuff covered.

Um you know but that's but that's i so you asked for my top ones the other one is yeah i would not i would not buy these books if you are not a realms fan and if you plan on running a game in the realms right like i think and and particularly running a game in one of those five regions like i look at it and say i would totally run a campaign in the cormier or i'm sorry in the in the dale lands right like dale lands is one of the areas it has been again 35 years since i played a game in the day lens and they have a nice big juicy section of the day lens in there with lots of cool stuff i would i think it would be totally worth it to pick these up to have new character options that are forgotten realms based have a lot of focus material on the realms in general, you know gods daily life calendars holidays all the kind of things that you need to, to fill in the details and then zero down into things that are going on around the various towns and villages of the Dalens plus Myth Dranor as their big kind of adventure zone area.

There's one long adventure and 50 small adventures in this.

Wow.

The one long adventure, they say you could put near any of the regions, but it was clearly meant to be dropped in the Dalens area.

So that feels like, you know, if you remember like the Eberron Rising from the Last War book had a huge thing on Sharn.

And the idea was like, if you're going to run an Eberron campaign, you could do worse than to start in Sharn and then expand out from there.

This one also feels like you could do a lot worse than starting in the Dalelands and expanding out.

I've been looking at the...

So I've got the table of contents in front of me.

So looking at Adventures in Farnes.

So we've got the areas it covers are the Dalelands.

Yep.

Icewind Dale.

Yep.

What else have we got?

We've got Kalimshan.

Yep.

Moonshade Isles.

Yep.

Baldur's Gate.

that's it yep.

Uh those are the five yeah those are and then we go the adventures yeah yeah the adventures.

Library of like something or other and then let's go let's let's let's turn let's turn us let's turn us i don't know yeah right yeah and so those sections if you look at like i was really curious because for me it was like well once i'm i'm i'm i want deep forgotten realms lore is what i'm really looking for and so i was like how much of these books are giving me deep forgotten realms lore and and it's a lot right each of those sections run between 30 you know i think moon shay is 29 pages dale ends is 45 pages 38 pages for ice when dale 32 pages for calum shan 35 pages for balder's gate and and so my complaints were like i already bought ice when dale you're making me buy ice when dale again and i've already got you know i got balder's gate coming out of my ears i really don't need more bald you know what there's nothing forgotten about Baldur's Gate in this Forgotten Realms book, right?

However, what's interesting is they did kind of, I didn't look quite as deep in the Baldur's Gate, but in the Icewind Dale, they already wrote around the premise that the events of both Legacy of the Crystal Shard and Rhyme of the Frostmaiden have already taken place.

So now we have like the expanded area.

And the other interesting thing is they, it wasn't so much on just focusing on a region.

It was also focusing on a scene.

So kind of your survivalist horror of the Dale ends, or I'm sorry, the survivalist horror of Icewind Dale versus your more traditional European fantasy of the Dale ends versus your kind of urban intrigue of Baldur's Gate.

You know, kind of fate, you know, focus on the fae and fairies and the moon shay and sort of, you know, Eastern and genie kind of stuff going on.

I haven't really, I haven't really read that, that area thoroughly either.

Okay.

But yeah, and a lot.

And then if you look at the Heroes book, this is where I think like why it's kind of mislabeled as a player guide.

There are 48 pages.

I said 80 pages, but that's close.

There are 48 pages for the guide to the realms, which is, that describes every region of the realms.

The gods of the realms is 33 pages.

The factions is 39 pages, right?

So that's a lot of page count focusing on lore, which is great for me because that's what I want.

I want to i want to have lots of information and lots of lore and there is sort of a player focus on that right but some people brought up that there's actually spoilers to things so like they talk about i think they talk about phandalin and they spoil the phandelver and below hardcover adventure right they say like what the you know what's the big thing going on there and they just tell you right you're like well there was like three chapters of that book okay um so so yeah A lot covered.

38 pages of monsters, five pages of magic items.

Character options.

So here's the, character options is 32 pages.

So the whole idea of like, hey, we have new subclasses, we have new feats, we have new backgrounds.

That only takes 32 pages.

The magic spells are 11 pages, right?

I mean, we've got equipment as well, I suppose.

And the circle casting rules, I guess a player facing rules.

That is, right.

But it's still not a lot, right?

I mean, equipment, whatever.

So like, In terms of what you want to see in a book, it feels like this is a really pleasing and positive book for you.

Lots of lore to help you really have these settings fleshed out for you.

Whereas myself, I don't like other people's lore.

I'd rather make it.

Yeah, then don't buy it.

Yeah, I'm really getting that buy.

I've had people who were like, well, could I steal stuff from this?

Like, yeah, but not for $110.

You can go make your own stuff up.

The idea of this, to me, there are other.

I mean, you know, like I'll put my own book, right?

I wrote a book called City of Arches and City, which doesn't cost $110.

And City of Arches is literally designed for you to be able to drop into your own campaign.

Like you can put it in the Forgotten Realms.

You can put it in Everon.

You can put it your own home campaign, wherever you want to put it.

And it was designed to be kind of stripped for parts like that.

This one's so in-depth and so...

Could you?

Of course you can.

Like, you can take the monsters and put them in anything.

Is it worth $110 to buy this just to strip it for parts for a home campaign?

I would argue no.

I really think, like, you know...

That's why I say, like, if you don't...

It's really simple.

If you don't like the Forgotten Realms, don't buy it, right?

Not the book for you.

and i mean that's a really plan on running campaigns in there you like you if you really like the realms and you just want to live in the realms and read about that stuff and let you enjoy it then sure like you know pick them up but to me it's like not i for me the the the argument that i would make is a you have to like the realms b um you plan on running a campaign there and c you plan on running a campaign in one of the regions that it focuses on yes and if you're doing those then I think you get a lot of value out of these books.

Yeah.

And if you, if you want to run realm stuff, this is my other argument.

If you want to run realm stuff and you're like, I don't know about all this.

I don't like the regions.

And you know, the, the fricking third edition forgotten realms campaign guide is $16 on, on DM skill.

Right.

It's dirt cheap and has, it has more.

It's, it's like, you know, 80,000 words bigger.

Right.

So then both of these books put together.

So it's got a ton of material in it.

So if you just want to kind of dive into the realms and you don't want to spend 110 bucks like that old book is really really good and that's kind of the gold standard i mean lots of people say the great the old gray box set which you can also buy in the dm's guild, um you know that's good you know those are those are really good too but um yeah i i feel like the you know if you want to just kind of soak in realms lore or find stuff that you can strip for parts.

You know, it's hard to beat $16 versus $110.

Yeah.

So this is basically, you know, you need to be a Realms fan to buy this.

I would say so.

Yeah.

Or if you're new to RPG, right?

If you're new, like there's a ton of people that are brand, like there's a, I think the majority, right?

The majority of 5e players have not had a Forgotten Realms release ever.

Yeah.

Right?

For them.

Like this was the first Forgotten Realms, like the Sword Coast book.

Was one of the first books that came out and the growth of 5e didn't happen until after that so this might be the first real i mean obviously there's been a bunch of adventures set there um and that explained a lot of the realms but this is the first one so if you're like you know hey and i think christian hofer talked about this in his i read i read his article earlier today you know before he came on and i think he mentioned this that like one of the big kind of you know problems with the core books is that there was almost no flavor in them right there was no setting there was no real kind of description there's no list of gods like i found that really bizarre like no list of gods and then he said now it makes more sense if you look at these books and you're like okay that's the that's the you know the mechanics that's the scaffolding and this is.

Paint right this is everything around it and and then because like boy you know I forget there's 50 gods listed or something like that right so if you want gods boy you got yeah so I was just looking at the list 33 pages of gods so um so if you want to enjoy that full Dungeons and Dragons experience as a new player we actually just drop $270 for the three four books and these two books here then yeah it's starting to get pretty pricey yeah I mean yeah, $260, but yeah.

I do make it on my mistake.

I look forward to seeing the Beatle and Grimm version.

Yeah, right.

I mean, this is kind of interesting because one of the things I really love about role-playing games, one of the things I'm kind of fascinated by role-playing games is that you can have a cost of zero or a cost of millions of dollars in this hobby, right?

I mentioned seeing that Forgotten Realms map.

That place has millions of dollars worth of stuff in it.

And if you look at the critical role studio right that is a million dollars rpg studio right like that if you if you were like hey i'm gonna stream a game at a nice place that's a million dollar studio and then the other side is like you can play with the srd right you can play with free materials and go as i like to say you know go to the dog track and steal a pencil and you know you can play dnd for nothing but your only cost is basically one set of dice basically maybe but There's online dice rollers you can get for free.

Or make spinners, man.

Go to your local game shop and crawl underneath the tables and you'll find dice down there.

They're questionable.

They might've been there a while, right?

You probably want to wash them and probably get a penicillin shot when you're done.

But after you're done, you've got a nice set of dice.

Um, so I like that, but it feels like certainly from wizards that the average price is moving up right now.

The core books are not the core books are the same price they were back in 2014, even direct.

So those books I feel like are actually a pretty good value because inflation certainly went up in the 10 years that, that those books came out.

This one's feeling a little pricey.

And like, I, I had talked about, you know, Eberron rising from the last war is kind of my gold standard 5e Wizards published source book.

And I remember looking at that and being like, we're never going to see that value again.

The font size was smaller, so there was more words in the overall book.

The book itself was $50 and it was 320 pages.

And you're like, they're never doing that again.

That was it.

You get that on Amazon for it.

I think there was a time where it was like 19 bucks on Amazon.

And I'm like, that is the best deal you're going to get.

So if you're you know money matters to a lot of people these days and that's why i'm fixated on that but but um now if you happen to be in a good position where you can spend 110 bucks on a source book this is fantastic like i did right i went michelle my wife and i ran to the local game shop yesterday and picked them up and they're beautiful they're beautiful books the writing is good the one thing i really look for is like how adventure oriented is the writing which is something i'm not sure the older books do well i don't know that the third edition book does quite as good a job at this like if you're describing a location i ought to be able to get a hook out of that that i can then build an adventure around or even maybe build a campaign on and they've done they've done a lot of that in here i wouldn't say it's perfect but i've said many times i would look at it like ah i could i could run an adventure based on that little prompt about that one little town right over here yeah i mean which is something that 13 page to.

Shout back to earlier in the podcast that's something that they do extremely well like they don't bind you to a canon they offer you eight to 13 different options many of which are contradictory for each particular point they bring out which yeah it's absolutely fantastic right and it's just hooks galore that book um do you feel that there's like i mean obviously not gonna be a similar amount of hooks but are there good hooks in the yes there are a lot yeah so so they really you know and again maybe i mean i'd have to like sit and look at them side by side but i definitely feel like more so than older versions of the forgotten realms this one you know in in a few different ways have they make it like adventure oriented this idea of like i'm a gm i'm a busy guy i want to run games for my friends give me material to help me run games for my friends and there's kind of three things they've done with that uh one of them is that idea that But in all of the description, not all of them, but in many of the descriptions, you can kind of pick out a hook and be like, ah.

I can grab that idea and I can build an adventure around it.

And that's even in the regional guide, right?

That's even in the player, the quote unquote player guide, where they have adventure-y sort of things.

There's a little bit of occasion of a little bit of like, there are dangerous monsters in these woods.

And I'm like, well, that's not a useful statement.

Which, what kind of dangerous monsters might you find in those woods?

I know there are dangerous monsters in my fantasy RPG.

Tell me where it is.

So there's a couple instances of that.

But then the second thing they do is these regional focuses, where they really deep dive into them.

And the regions have things like, here's the kind of style of play that you could have here.

Here are the bosses that you could have here.

Here's, they have campaign arcs.

You know, if you're running a campaign, this is the kind of arc that you could run for this campaign.

So that's very oriented around, you know, GMs wanting to run adventures.

And then they have, we were talking a little bit about innovation in RPG, innovation at Wizards.

And one of the things I would say like, well, they're giving this a shot and we'll see kind of how people dig it.

Um, if you remember the dungeon master's guide, they have these adventure scenarios, uh, that are like a half a page.

They're like less than 500 words.

And, and the intent is that there's enough stuff in there that a GM could grab it and run.

They have 50 of 50 of those in there.

So these are regional focused, they're faction focused, they're location focused, you know, they're, they're kind of situation focused.

So, and they kind of tag them and describe that they say what level they are, they say what kind they are.

and then they have like really short adventures that, in my opinion, are reading a lot of them.

Many of them, I feel like, yeah, this is enough.

Like.

I'm you're always going to have to add more to it.

Your group is going to add more to it, but this is enough of a good scaffold for me to be able to build a session with my friends.

Some of them are better than others, but I don't think that's a big surprise.

And most of them have new maps and the map.

So there's a lot of maps and that's typically in this, in this, you know, the adventures when they, and they call it that adventures in fair rune is accurate, right?

Because there are lots and lots and lots of adventures in here.

There's one chapter that's packed with about 30 of those adventures.

And then the others are spread into the other section.

So if you go to the Dayland section, there's like five or six Dayland adventures.

And they all have like a spread with like a map and then, you know, and they're like one page.

And I think that is, you know, I applaud it.

I don't know how people are going to, you know, different groups are going to, or different GMs are going to grab onto those.

Some are going to be like, are you kidding me?

400 words?

How can you pack an adventure into 400 words?

I need at least 32 pages, right?

And you were...

So, but I look at them and I go, I think this is enough for me to get an idea of what I want.

And there's so many that I can skip one and be like, yeah, I don't like that one.

I'll just do another.

You can download one of them for free as well from D&D Beyond.

They put that out last week, I think it was.

Right.

And we talked about that last week.

So if you want to get an idea of what those adventures look like.

There's an example out there that you can go and take a look at.

Yeah.

And there's a ton of maps, right?

Like one thing that is...

I think there's way more maps in here than I've ever seen in a campaign source book because at least half of those adventures have a map associated with it.

And then they do something kind of interesting, which I like, which is some of them don't have a map, but say you can use the map of the wizard's tower in the Dungeon Master's Guide, right?

So they're like, we know you have the Dungeon Master's Guide.

We have a bunch of maps in there.

You can use one of those maps to fill in this.

And I'm like, okay, that's cool, right?

That's a way to get more value out of the other books.

Sensible cross-reference.

Yeah, and I think...

You know, so I'm a GM advice guy, right?

That's kind of my shtick.

And to me, that's teaching good lessons because it's saying like, you know, these are loose frameworks for adventures and you can go ahead and reuse those maps that you have in the DMG.

And then like, oh, I could do that on my own too.

And I guess you can, right?

Like, so I think it's, I think it's doing a little bit of subtle GM training in there too.

Oh, I see.

And in a way that I think is effective, which is this, you know, like you don't need as much as you think you need in order to run an adventure and you can reuse stuff like maps.

And kind of reskin them to fit the adventure that you've got so i like i like that a lot you mentioned factions yes um now i haven't read the 2024 dng oh i haven't seen the gossip realms works but is there advice on how to run a faction yes uh in the 2024 dungeon master's guide or in this in either so i don't remember what the dungeon master's guide says about factions i know it i I know it does.

I know it has to.

It's got something about it.

But it's not like it was in the 2014 books where it says, hey, here are five factions, right?

Like, I think the old Dungeon Master's Guide had the Harpers and Order of the Gauntlet.

They picked the Forgotten Realms factions.

Yeah.

This one has a bunch of factions in it.

I think it has, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Eight.

Yeah, so there are eight major factions in here that are written as though your characters could come from these factions or work with these factions, even though they are the Red Wizards, the Zintarim, and the Cult of the Dragon.

So it has three, what I would consider to be evil factions that you could be parts of.

And it's kind of funny.

they have this cool table of like which factions get along with which other actions.

And like, you know, the, the red wizard is like indifferent to two and hated by everybody else.

That's really kind of funny.

And then in the faction section, they have two different things that tie back to the 2024 dungeon master's guide, which is gaining renown.

The idea that the more you do things that affect these factions, the more your reputation with the faction goes up and then you get stuff, right?

Like, like things will happen and they tied back into bastions and there are both bastions.

I think there are bastions that are associated with factions and also bastions that are focused on those regions.

Like if you're in the Daylands, hey, this area could end up becoming a bastion for you that you could then build out into other things.

So they didn't, you know, they didn't just forget about those two new features of 2024 D&D.

They have added that stuff in here.

And I think I haven't really used bastions.

They didn't grab me super hard when i when i read them originally because they didn't feel like they were solving the big problem i have which is what should characters spend their money cash sink yeah and they're not a cash thing so then some of them are cash generators that is a problem yeah now it's even worse also like you know do we really want to turn our game into the sims but um but they have them here and they see you know i think like even if you're like hey i'm not going to use bastions directly but i am going to have home bases this still gives you an idea of like the kind of things that you could do with the with home bases yeah and they all have symbols so and the gods do too which i think is like another sort of table user thing of like here are all the gods here's the symbol of the god so now i can describe that symbol on a wall and then the players could learn like you know i could say like you find a six-pointed snowflake etched into the stone wall of this ancient freezing cavern and you're like that's oral right that is a symbol of oral right it's fabulous dude that's really useful yeah.

I know you haven't like delved into the players often so much i was looking at the table of contents here and i noticed that has a species section which is only six pages long um so i'm guessing the species the character species section yes um um so i was just curious what i presume they haven't presented each one in full in there.

In those six pages so the the the character species section this is something i i like right and one of the things and i i could be different i know i'm different than other people but one of the things i think about is like if i'm dropping my 110 bucks on these books i'm kind of hoping that one day i'm sliding in my on my walker with the little uh tennis balls stuck on the end and i can pull these off the shelf and still enjoy them and use them in my 12th edition dnd game right Right.

And so I'm more interested in this stuff that I think is more timeless than like, here's a bunch of crunchy mechanics you're not going to use.

And the reason why is because when I pull the third edition Forgotten Realms guide and I see, hey, here's a page long stat box for El Minister.

I'm like, yeah, I'm not using that.

Right.

Like, hey, I didn't use it back then because it was too complicated.

And I'm sure you're not going to use it now.

So one of the cool things this does with with species is it describes what the role of the species is in the Forgotten Realms.

So it's not like here's a bunch of new species it's like here are what the aasimar are like in the realms here are what dragonborn are like in the realms right here are elves and it talks about sun and moon elves which are unique to forgotten realms and what those mean but it doesn't say like here's a whole new set of mechanics for elves so it just refers you back to the core rule books for them, yeah it's expectation is the core rule book is where you're going to look at the mechanics for elves and instead here's where they fit humans right huge section of humans and orcs.

And orcs are different, right?

Because we never really had orc as a playable character race in a core book before.

And this gets into like, you know, Obuld many arrows, right?

The whole connection of the orcs in Forgotten Realms had a big focus on this guy, King Obuld many arrows, right?

And so it talks about like what the orcs are like now.

And so, yeah, in the race section, there is no, you know, there are no crunchy bits.

It's all lore.

And again, maybe you're into that.

maybe you're like oh i really wanted new sun elf ancestry stuff yeah you know i'm i'm good with this right i'm i'm yeah i'm all about like re-skinning stuff and to me the flavor that we wrap around it and and i think like it makes it useful because what if i want to play with shadow dark right what if i like to forgotten realms but i'm like i'd like to have that classic second edition feel and i'm going to use shadow dark for it well now i can use shadow dark with this and not worry that i wasted a bunch of money on on on a bunch of crunchy mechanics that i'm going to use yeah yeah but but when you get into subclasses obviously then you get into crunchy bits um but it's not a lot uh they do have new backgrounds too and the backgrounds are are laid out the same way that they're laid out in the player's guide kind of a big strip of art at the top and then a very short like 100 page background thing and you know these have a lot of flavor what's interesting is i like these so much better than i like the ones in the player's guide because to me, the player handbook, they were so boring, like guard, farmer, right?

These are not filling me with high fantasy feelings, right?

But now you're ready.

Well, they're not tying you into the world is what they're not doing with the fashion.

But I still feel like they could have been more flavorful than farmer, right?

There's something more there, especially when farmer is the good one because it has toughness.

And there were lots of toughness as a feat.

But now it's, you know.

You know, Shondathian Freebooter, Dead Magic Dweller, Emerald Enclave Caretaker, Dragon Cultist, Ice Fisher, Ice Fisher is kind of boring, Harper.

Flaming Fist Mercenary, right?

These are very specific on, you know, your role.

And I think that, you know, that really adds a lot of flavor to it.

Yeah.

Like I said, it ties you into the world as well because your background is linked to a fiction element of the world rather than just farmer, which it doesn't yeah it's a bunch of new feats i haven't looked into them i always worry whenever there's new mechanics too because it's like oh god is this going to break my game right one of these things going to really do it i and i forget i don't think no i can't remember it's in this book if i saw one i'm like oh i'm gonna have to nerf that right away right yeah um yeah really good yeah but it sounds like was it's a really knocking out the park in terms of law yes um and that's i suppose that's very good to hear and then you know same same as always the physical design of the book like yeah i could just spend a minute talking about this and dnd beyond right.

Um the physical design of the book is just gorgeous right like big full and this is where like you know the the work comparing it to the word count right this is where you're not this is something you miss like i miss when i'm just comparing word count is the art in this book is it's way bigger you have giant like three-quarter page you know pictures of dragons yeah you know doing stuff it's really really good the layout is really nice the art is great um you know it's got tons and tons of little small maps again this is in the player's guide has the regional maps that show you like you know aglarond and fey and rashomon and you know all these locations some of them like there's the one called the forgotten lands and you're like i'm never reading that right like the the font size on the map is super small it's also super small on the foldout map too right it's really kind of hard to read some of these yeah um and you know they struggled right like you know they were like oh how do we make that so it's still readable.

Um, but the, but the physical, something I think is missed when people just go and buy it on D and D beyond is how gorgeous these physical books are.

Right.

And like wizards, all my complaints about it, the physical design is great.

Right.

It really is.

These are, these are printed in America too, for anybody that's kind of interested in where they're printed, printed in the USA.

Um, I know that wizards had recently moved to a U S printer.

I think they did that for the core books too.

Um, which can account for the price, right?

The whole reason that's $110 for the two books.

The printing in US printing is more expensive, certainly.

There's a picture of Gore Tash for Jessica.

What you've basically got there from a production value point of view is almost like coffee table books because there's lots of art, there's lots of lore, there's lots of stuff you just sit there and browse through and read rather than just being a rules reference manual.

It's also very table usable, right?

That to me is the other shtick.

I spent some time kind of going through old Forgotten Realms books recently because I was like, you know, we're, we're missing all these great, I was still mad about Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate.

And I was like, you know, there's all these other books from second edition, third edition, D and D that we could dive into.

And they have all this lore and they're like, they were good back then.

So why aren't they good now?

You know, we still, still, you know, we can still focus a lot on them.

Um.

Forgot what my train is i forgot my train of thought well i guess one final question because i think we're coming up to four o'clock and we have to and to gooseberries and so forth yeah he's um you mentioned that there's five areas that it focuses on and too much ball to skate too much high swindell you're all um i mean so when i say too much i'm i am personal this is like a mike jay personal thing yeah which is like i really would have loved say because like i feel like in the same way that the other regions have these sort of types of gameplay i feel like the the you know the overarching dark mageocracy and a ruler who is a necromancer where undead is part of the citizenry like that feels so different from like other stuff that we've seen that you know i already got the survival horror of ice windale rhyme of the frost maiden is still in print and having another focus of an area that literally hasn't been touched.

Like there hasn't been a dedicated book about Fae since second edition, like 30, more than 30 years ago.

So like, that's what I wanted because I feel like, look, I was a good wizard citizen.

I, you, you, you put out rhyme of the frost maiden and I played it.

I played it for two groups.

I hated it.

And I played it anyway.

I played it anyway.

Right.

I played it anyway because I'm a good- That's not how gaming's supposed to work, Mike.

You're doing it wrong.

Corporate citizen, right?

I did what you told me to do.

And by the way, I also did what you told me to do and ran Legacy of the Crystal Shard back at the tail end of fourth and early into fifth edition, right?

That was one of my first fifth edition adventures.

So I'm playing the games you're putting out and now you're making me do it again, right?

Third time.

So that's where I'm like, I want newer stuff.

But, you know, the argument is people know Icewind Dale.

Everybody loves Drizzt.

You know, they want it.

I don't think they, I'm not sure that's true.

I don't think people care about Icewind Dale nearly as much as they used to.

Now, Baldur's Gate, absolutely.

And I'm not going to argue that they shouldn't do Baldur's Gate.

Fine.

I also think like, you know what would have been more interesting?

Do a Baldur's Gate book, right?

Do a source book about Baldur's Gate that says, here's how to play in the aftermath of what happened at Baldur's Gate.

Well, they should have done that when, they should have done that when the video game played out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Right, right.

And then they, yeah, they can't, they can't ever quite seem to nail.

They did nail the Stranger Things box set.

They managed to get that out on time.

But generally coordinating a print activity is really, really challenging.

So I'll get over it.

And I know Oob's got a job.

You know, it's like, make this sort of thing work.

Yeah.

And the main thing for me is like, I just know that those are two sections of this book I am not going to want to use for like five years because I don't need to run another Baldur's Gate campaign.

I already ran, you know, Descent and Avernus, which I also didn't like.

So I've already done Baldur's Gate, you know, and I did.

How many of these games do you not like, Mike?

You seem to run a lot of games that you don't enjoy.

Those are the two big ones, right?

I think it was Descendant Avernus was one and Rhyme of the Frostmaiden was the other.

And that's where I said, I'm no longer just going to run every Wizard's Adventure that comes out.

I am not going to decide whether I actually want it or not.

And that's why I picked up like Vecna Eve of Ruin.

I hate it, right?

Like, I can't believe you have an adventure that's built upon betrayal from the very get-go.

And then if they find out, if they find out the truth, the whole adventure is over.

So, you know, I'm like, I'm not running that.

Spoiler.

Spoiler for anybody playing Vecna Eve of Ruin.

But I don't mind spoiling it because I think it's such, it's such a vulnerable adventure.

It deserves to be spoiled.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

But then, you know, other people are probably happy with it.

And I do look at the stuff they've done with Icewind Dale.

By having a new villain or like kind of a new weird set of villains and tying it back to the old Crencinibon crystal shard stuff made it cool enough that I'm like, I don't know that I want to run a campaign there, but I could, I could see getting back into this again.

And I could, you know, the Baldur's Gate stuff is interesting enough that, you know, Baldur's Gate is kind of a big deal.

I'm glad they didn't do Waterdeep because we already have Waterdeep Dragonized.

So they already made some kind of decisions about not replicating their stuff.

I can see it, but I, to me, like, you know, what, what makes it up for me is the, the big ass section on the Daylands I'm excited about, right?

And they obviously put a lot of effort into that section.

And the adventure, the bigger adventure is set there and there's a lot of small adventures.

And I feel like I could definitely run a campaign.

And then even when we get to that price of like the 110 bucks.

You know, that's pretty cheap for like 50 sessions of six people around a table, you know, three hours a session enjoying a good campaign.

Like that's cheaper than movies it's cheaper than video games, it's cheaper than novels.

So, you know, I think it's good.

Yeah, D&D Beyond I was going to talk about.

So both books are available on D&D Beyond as well.

My recommendation would be to pick up the Heroes book, or my recommendation would be get your players to buy the Heroes book on D&D Beyond, because they're the ones that are going to get the value out of her character options.

And then as a GM, unless you're playing with maps, if you're going to play with maps or a VTT, it's probably worth picking up the Adventures book just for all the maps you get right like there's a ton of digital maps that you're going to get with this uh on dnd beyond but if you're if you're playing on any other kind of platform i don't think you need to have the dnd beyond version of adventures in faroon you know because then you're still paying now you're paying even more right on top of it but i think the physical books are worth buying because a you really own them and b um they look really really good great objects of art almost yeah, That sounds amazing.

Thank you so much, Mike.

That's a really comprehensive review.

Yeah, happy to.

So that's taking general release on November the 1st, I've got in front of me.

When's that?

Tomorrow.

Sunday.

That can't be right.

Tomorrow.

That can't be right.

That's right.

That's tomorrow.

It can't be November the 1st.

When is it in general release?

I don't know.

No.

Because it's usually, when did you pick that one up, Mike?

Because it's usually two weeks in the hobby stores, and then it is general release, isn't it?

I think it came out Tuesday.

So Tuesday was when it was up on D&D Beyond.

And I think Tuesday was the first day stores could have it.

My store didn't get it till Thursday, but I got it yesterday.

So I think it's two weeks from Tuesday.

Oh, I found it.

The 11th, not the first.

I found it.

I don't know why I said the first.

Yeah, November the 11th.

Oh, okay.

Yes.

Because that'll be a Tuesday.

Yeah, yeah.

Right, right, right, right.

I think it's just coming up to time now, so we're going to call it there.

Sounds good.

Thank you so much, Wright, for coming on.

always love having you on yeah always a pleasure love doing it it's really weird because it gives me a chance to relax I don't have to talk so much as well it's great.

Yeah just have a chat with Mike it's a good time for everyone except hopefully Mike I don't know it's not a good story coming on Mike we always still like tattoos, Yeah, thank you so much.

Happy to be here.

Right.

We're going to get up here.

We're going to go and have Halloween now.

I'm going to start preparing my costume for tonight.

Go and find out how my wife's costume is coming on because she spent the last two hours.

I can smell the glue and the paint from here.

I think it might be quite toxic out there.

I'm not sure it's safe.

Luckily, I don't smoke, so I won't be lighting up any naked flames.

That could be a bad, bad life droid.

Solent's man.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

So thank you thank you everyone for joining us thank you so much Mike for coming along and until next week and Jess will be back next week which will make hopefully the technical side of it run a little more smoothly, until next week thank you all for joining us and bye bye bye bye.