Deal of the Day - GM's Miscellany: Dungeon Dressing (System Neutral Edition)

I've stated it before and I'll say it again, I'm a huge fan of Raging Swan's system-neutral series of releases to assist GM's with game prep and in-session improv. I'd snap GM's Miscellany: Dungeon Dressing (System Neutral Edition) up in a second at this price if I didn't already own it ;)

Until tomorrow morning at 11 AM Eastern, GM's Miscellany: Dungeon Dressing (System Neutral Edition) is on sale in PDF for 6.99, 50% off its usual price of 13.99.

A System Neutral Edition GM's Resource by Ben Armitage, Alexander Augunas, Aaron Bailey, John Bennett, Creighton Broadhurst, Jeff Erwin, James Graham, Brian Gregory, Eric Hindley, Ben Kent, Thomas King, Greg Marks, Andrew J. Martin, Jacob W. Michaels, Julian Neale, Chad Perrin,  David Posener, Brian Ratcliff, Pierre van Rooden, Liz Smith, Josh Vogt and Mike Welham.

Tired of dungeons lacking in verisimilitude? Want to add cool little features of interest to your creations but don't have the time to come up with nonessential details? Want to make your dungeons feel more realistic?

Then GM’s Miscellany: Dungeon Dressing (System Neutral Edition) is for you! This gigantic compilations comprises all 34 instalments in the line as well as scores of riddles, new material and design essays by Creighton.  GM’s Miscellany: Dungeon Dressing (System Neutral Edition) presents loads of great features to add to your dungeon. Designed to be used both during preparation or actual play, GM’s Miscellany: Dungeon Dressing (System Neutral Edition)  is an invaluable addition to any GM's armoury!

GM’s Miscellany: Dungeon Dressing (System Neutral Edition) presents the material originally appearing in:

• Dungeon Dressing: Altars
• Dungeon Dressing: Archways
• Dungeon Dressing: Bridges
• Dungeon Dressing: Captives
• Dungeon Dressing: Ceilings
• Dungeon Dressing: Chests
• Dungeon Dressing: Corpses
• Dungeon Dressing: Doom Paintings
• Dungeon Dressing: Doors
• Dungeon Dressing: Double Doors
• Dungeon Dressing: Dungeon Entrances
• Dungeon Dressing: Dungeon Names
• Dungeon Dressing: Floors
• Dungeon Dressing: Fountains
• Dungeon Dressing: Gates & Portals
• Dungeon Dressing: Goblin’s Pockets
• Dungeon Dressing: Legends
• Dungeon Dressing: Legends II
• Dungeon Dressing: Mundane Chest Contents
• Dungeon Dressing: Pits
• Dungeon Dressing: Pools
• Dungeon Dressing: Portcullises
• Dungeon Dressing: Sarcophagi
• Dungeon Dressing: Secret Doors
• Dungeon Dressing: Simple Magic Traps
• Dungeon Dressing: Stairs
• Dungeon Dressing: Statues
• Dungeon Dressing: Tapestries
• Dungeon Dressing: Thrones
• Dungeon Dressing: Trapdoors
• Dungeon Dressing: Walls
• Dungeon Dressing: Wells
• So What’s The Riddle Like, Anyway?
• So What’s The Riddle Like, Anyway? II
• So What’s The Riddle Like, Anyway? III

New Material: New material focusing on concealed doors, strange growths, illumination, graffiti and loads of miscellaneous dungeon features; also includes nine dungeon design essays by Creighton.

This product is a Dual Format PDF. The downloadable ZIP file contains two versions, one optimised for printing and use on a normal computer and one optimised for use on a mobile device such as an iPad.

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. 

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar   

Humble Bundle - Give the Gift of Pathfinder and Starfinder Book Bundle (Paizo)

I do not play Pathfinder, but I certainly did manage to collect a number of Pathfinder 1e releases. By far, one of the best values in tabletop gaming for years was the Pathfinder 1e Beginner Box. While the Pathfinder 2e Beginner Box does quite hit the same heights, it is still impressive (yes, I own it - I simply had to know how it would compare to its predecessor).

Here are the price points for the Pathfinder 2e and Starfinder Book Bundle:

5 bucks get you both Pathfinder & Starfinder Starter Boxes and a number of adventures and accessories. 10 items in total

15 bucks give you bother Pathfinder & Starfinder Core Books and Both Starter Boxes as well as a number of adventures and accessories. 25 items in total.

25 bucks give you bother Pathfinder & Starfinder Core Books and Both Starter Boxes as well as a number of adventures and accessories. 25 items in total. 

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. 

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar 

Halloween Freebie - The Arkham Gazette #2

The Arkham Gazette #2 should be free until 11 AM Friday morning.

(other Halloween Freebies - check each day)

“Innsmouth? Well, it’s a queer kind of a town down at the mouth of the Manuxet. Used to be almost a city—quite a port before the War of 1812—but all gone to pieces in the last hundred years or so... And why is everybody so down on Innsmouth? Well, young fellow, you mustn’t take too much stock in what people around here say... Some of the stories would make you laugh—about old Captain Marsh driving bargains with the devil and bringing imps out of hell to live in Innsmouth..."

Welcome to Innsmouth!  Rumors have long swirled around the place, ever since a plague is said to have carried off so many of the town's residents in the 1840s.  Fallen into disrepair and decay, most locals shun the town and its unwholesome-looking inhabitant.  We've elected to brave Joe Sargents' bus and dive deep into the mysteries and dangerous secrets that, dare we say, cast a shadow over the place.

This issue includes the following eighteen articles:

• Shadows of Polynesia: Obed Marsh and his crew brought many things back from that island east of Tahiti...
• Locations in Greater Innsmouth: Three new locations for Innsmouth.
• The Wreck of the Elizabeth Wright: A new location outside of Innsmouth with connection to the town.
• Innsmouth’s Burying Grounds: A deep examination of the many cemeteries in and near Innsmouth.
• On the name “Dagon”: Where did this name come from?  Why did Obed Marsh use it?  What does that imply?
• “The marine abyss beyond Devil Reef”: Bathography versus Lovecraft!
• Edward Morse: A real-world scholar who might be of interest to your investigators.
• The Isle of Shoals and Other Innsmouth Inspiration: Real-world places that have some parallel to Innsmouth - the Isles of Shoals, Matinicus Island and the Malaga Island community.
• The Sacred Cod: Why is there a carved fish idol in the Massachusetts State House?
• The Hymnal of the Esoteric Order of Dagon: A new tome extoling the greatest of Innsmouth's new faith.
• The Ponape Scripture: An in-depth exporation of this tome of occult oceanic lore created by Lin Carter.
• The Feejee Mermaid: P.T. Barnum's dubious mummified "mermaid"; real-world history and occult (and Mythos) options.
• Innsmouth Curios: 8 Weird artifacts investigators can discover.
• Innsmouth Gold: All about Innsmouth's most notable export.
• Cancelled Innsmouth Books: A discussion of two cancelled books Chaosium was once planning related to Innsmouth - the Innsmouth Horror and Children of the Deep.
• A Guide to Newburyport: An extended description of the town that inspired Innsmouth and how you can use it in your Lovecraft Country games.
• “Drawn from the Water”: A Kingsport artist has gone missing and the investigators must follow his trail.  Dark secrets lurk in the waters just off shore...
• Annotated list of Innsmouth scenarios: Notes for the Keeper on all 14 of the Innsmouth-connected scenarios that we can locate in Lovecraft Country as well as a list of every Deep One scenario we can find.

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. 

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar   

The Dread Thingonomicon (Free Sample)

I bought The Dread Thingonomicon (in Print plus PDF) and it is amazing. I have yet to give it a proper read-through, so a review is still a bit of a way out. In the meantime, here's a free sample to peruse.

The Dread Thingonomicon (Free Sample)

Are you a busy GM? Does session prep take too long? Do you never have time to design the cool little details that bring your game to life? Fear not! That’s where the Dread Thingonomicon comes in.

Crammed full of system-neutral themed lists, flavourful NPCs and more, the Dread Thingonomicon is designed to give you—the time-crunched GM—the tools to effortlessly add flavoursome verisimilitude to your game.

If your campaign features abnormal lesser undead, alchemist’s laboratories, ancient necropolises, archives & libraries, bandits & brigands, besieged castles, black dragon lairs, blue dragon lairs, bustling marketplaces, corpses, creepy graveyards, crypts & catacombs, cultists’ lairs, curio shops & pawnbrokers, dark caverns, fairs & festivals, fallen dwarven holds, fanes of evil, fanes of good, farming villages, fecund jungles, forts on the borderland, ghostly hauntings, goblin lairs, green dragon lairs, haunted houses, henchfolk & hirelings, hill giant steadings, items most wondrous, kobold warrens, lich’s lairs, local landmarks, lunatic asylums, merchant caravans, minions of evil, necromancer’s lairs, noble’s manor houses, noisome marshes, noisome sewers, ocean voyages, orc villages, red dragon lairs, roads, ruined castles, ruined cities, ruined monasteries, ruined wizard’s towers, seedy taverns, shadowed borderlands, slavers’ compounds, smugglers’ villages, smugglers’ lairs, snow and ice, subterranean mines, sun-scorched deserts, sunken ships, thievish doings, torture chambers, travellers’ inns, troublesome treasures, urban chases, urban events, urban landmarks, urban oddities, vampire’s castles, war-ravaged lands, white dragon lairs, wilderness camps, windswept moors, wizard’s towers and wrecked ships (and whose doesn’t?) the Dread Thingonomicon is for you!

Comprising the entire 20 Things line, the Dread Thingonomicon weighs in at 476 pages of content and is the culmination of seven years of design.

Use the system-neutral material herein either before or during play and bask in your players’ adulation.

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. 

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar   

Kickstarter - Cats of Rahtlü - DCC RPG module

An investigative sandbox filled with HP Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith mythos mood and a fine sprinkling of Hüsker Dü.

A DCC RPG Adventure revolving around cats? Color me intrigued. Good adventures are relatively systemless, and the building blocks of this adventure, "HP Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith mythos mood", seem damn inspiring to me.

Cats of Rahtlü is a 1st level sandbox adventure for the DCC RPG game. 8 bucks in PDF, and 15 bucks for Print plus PDF. I consider that a fair price.

Cats of Rahtlü is a 1st level investigative sandbox using Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. Rahtlü, a small farming village, needs the party's help as mysteries abound. Rahtlü bears striking similarities to another town you may have heard of -- Ulthar. Yes, this town also has laws against killing those of the feline persuasion. Yes, the strange old couple inimical to the cats dwells under a large oak, but there's more to all this than meets the eye!

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. 

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar   

Bundle of Holding - Weird Frontiers (DCC RPG Engine in the Weird Wild West)

I backed the Weird Frontiers RPG Kickstarter and received my copy earlier this year. It is a beautiful beast of a book, simply oozing with atmosphere and playable content. I must say I am truly surprised and pleased to see this available on Bundle of Holding, as Weird Frontiers should be in as many hands as possible.

Howdy, trailhand! This all-new Weird Frontiers Bundle presents Weird Frontiers from Stiff Whiskers Press, a standalone Lovecraftian horror-Western tabletop roleplaying game based on the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG from Goodman Games. In an alternate 1865, cultists of Nyarlathotep brought on the Seven Days of Night to awaken long-dormant Elder Gods. Now heroes with extraordinary abilities stand against an ever-growing evil in a wounded country still recovering from the bloodiest war in American history. You can turn tail or take the fight to the night, and you ain't about to be called yeller! Saddle your horses and clean those irons, 'cause there's something slithering across the dark frontier and it's dead set on making vittles out of you and your ragtag posse.

For just US$9.95 you get all three titles in our Starter Collection (retail value $45) as DRM-free ebooks, including the complete 908-page Weird Frontiers RPG core rulebook, the Judge's Screen, and the Trail Map.

Nest of Snakes adventure for Weird Frontiers - And if you pay more than the threshold price of $20.18, you'll level up and also get our entire Bonus Collection with five complete adventures worth an additional $50, including Never Swallow the Worm!, Not So Fast, Billy Ray!, Dig Three Graves, The Malevolent Seven, and Nest of Snakes.

 

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. 

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar   

How Far Are You Willing to go for a Game?

This weekend I had the pleasure of game....now the game itself isn't a special occasion worthy of note (don't get me wrong, I generally treasure every time I get to sling dice), but I had the pleasure of being able to play with one of my "regular" fellows who has been absent from the game for a couple of months now. Unfortunately some "big picture" life shit that nobody wants to have to deal with had gotten in the way and I think that getting in on this session was a bit of a sacrifice for my buddy.

It got me thinking, as these things do (currently cursed with sleeping issues, so that's a thing) and I really started wondering, "Just how far are people willing to go for a game?"

The question is a simple one, but really.....I think more than anything this is the deciding factor between people who are "gamers" and those who are not. Now for me the answer is simple, but my hip-shot response is roughly 2,054 miles. Yes, I've travelled 2,054 miles just for a game. Not at a convention either, but once I went from Boise to Chattanooga TN to run, well playtest really, a tournament adventure I was writing.

Now I'm not bragging. I had the weekend and (fortunately) the resources to "waste" the time to have the reigning World Champs poke holes in my adventure. It was that important to me so on many levels I wasn't going that far for a game.

Usually the go-to response, and I'm going to say this is from a non-gamer who identifies as a gamer......yeah, I went there....is "I don't have time to play."

First off, I'm going to call bullshit. Less that a thousandth of a percent of us, pretty much nobody who actually reads this blog, actually has their day scheduled out to the extent that they cannot make time for things that are important to them. What I mean is, if it is important we make time for it and if it isn't, we don't. When people say they don't have time, what they are actually saying is, "I'm trying to be polite and not tell you that the thing we're talking about isn't that important to me."

Sure time can be at a premium, but...and bear with me here...if you're a gamer and a specific time is an issue, then look for a new time! My group has had to switch from Saturday to Friday games for time scheduling reasons. I'm not sure how to feel about that yet, but I'm slinging dice so no reason to complain. I'm just fortunate that I don't have major life issues popping up to get in the way (currently, I do remember a few unexpected ones causing grief in the past.) and my work is steady enough to schedule regular game time.

In addition to having time to game, or (as I'm clearly laying down...make time to game) the next nut to  crack to get a gaming fix (bad attempt at a pun) is to find a place to game. My game is online, which is great for me since my work travel, when that happens, is for longer stretches than normal. Now as a single guy with a home...and soon a bonafide game room, a place isn't an issue, and really hasn't been an issue since I was a kid.

I've known players, and even GMs, where gaming space was an issue. In one instance we played in one players home so they'd be able to attend the game. For a while we gamed at the local college...student unions can be great gaming spaces if you don't mind some extra attention (which can be a benefit!) and some game store actually encourage games in their space.

Lastly, well at least the last thing that's coming to mind right now, is in addition to needing time and a place to play, you kind of.....only kind of...need other people to play with. Luckily there are single player games and online play is a thing. There are several online systems ranging from a simple Zoom call (which my group uses) to rather detailed simulated gaming virtual table-tops. Game stores and colleges often have people looking to game, so maybe you can fill a couple requirements in one place?

While I originally was thinking about how far people are willing to go to game, and how there can be barriers to slinging the dice.....thing is...well...we're gamers....problem solving is literally a skill we play with. Really kind of redefines things. I'm of the opinion that we all have some barriers but if it means we get to game.....well most are surmountable, and outside of that "big picture life shit", gamers should be gaming!

So....how far are you willing to go for a game?

....and because I know he reads this....great to have you back Steve!