Deal of the Day - The Halls of Arden Vul Complete (HUGE Megadungeon)

Let me open by saying that I own The Halls of Arden Vul Complete in Print and PDF, and yes, the print is damn expensive but worth every penny. While I am unsure I'll ever run The Halls of Arden Vul Complete as the whole campaign (which is likely impossible for me) I do plan on liberally stealing from it during my next campaign ;)

Until tomorrow morning around 11 AM Eastern, The Halls of Arden Vul Complete is on sale for $43.60 in PDF (down from its usual $109 in PDF, so 60% off). It is a monster of a mega-dungeon, extremely well-written, and a literal shit-ton to read and digest. ears of gaming await you ;)

Prepare to Beard the Halls of Arden Vul!

• Arden Vul is the most ambitious megadungeon ever created, with over 1,100 Pages of Incredible Adventure. This First Edition compatible fully-bookmarked PDF product features:
• 2,162 Encounter Descriptions
• 14 NPC Factions
• 10 Massive Levels
• 15 Extensive Sub-levels
• 7 Dangerous Exterior locations
• 149 New Monsters
• 332 New Magic Items
• 69 New Technological Items
• 44 New Spells
• 189 New Books through which PCs can gain a deep understanding of the dungeon
• A full NPC appendix with 10 competing parties at 3 levels of power
• Over 140 original pieces of art, including 28 full-page illustrations!

All of this is mapped via 33 Amazing Maps that you can download for free at The Maps of Arden Vul. As we have gotten requests for VTT player's maps we have created The VTT Maps of Arden Vul for free as well. If you know you want the physical copies, just head over to the Arden Vul Bundle and get everything Arden Vul in one fell swoop.

There has never been anything like Arden Vul, and there never will be again.

Welcome to the Halls of Arden Vul!

If you want everything but can't afford the full Arden Vul Bundle right now, those who order this PDF can receive 33% discounts on the print versions at a later date so you can piece-meal your purchase as finances allow. Just send me an e-mail (josephbrowning@gmail.com) with your Complete PDF order number and I'll get the discount codes to you.

 

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

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 - 50 Patrons of the Market, Systemless Fantasy RPG Cards (Phil Reed)

Who do the adventurers meet in the market? Shuffle and draw one of these 50 cards to spark the next encounter. Designed by Philip Reed.

I've said this before, so I'll say it again - I consider Phil Reed a friend and he never ceases to amaze me with the usefulness and affordability of his various Kickstarters for improv-heavy GMs. It's simply "good stuff".

What does Phil give us with the 50 Patrons of the Market, Systemless Fantasy RPG Cards Kickstarter?

Welcome, gamemasters! 50 Patrons of the Market is a collection of NPCs that you can drop into almost any fantasy roleplaying game. There are zero game stats or rules included in this set. Instead, every card features an NPC illustration as well as a short bit of descriptive text to inspire you.

The included non-player characters may serve as companions, enemies, or contacts for the adventurers. Each is limited solely by your imagination and the actions of the players.

The cards are numbered just in case you should ever want to write down notes. It makes it easy to find the card in question.

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

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 - Shadow of the Demon Lord

I've heard it said among some that Shadow of the Demon Lord is what 5e was meant to be. Dark, grim, and deadly. I read through my dead tree copy of Shadow of the Demon Lord back when the game was released and although it looked damn interesting, my gaming group was not interested.

Shadow of the Demon Lord is a current bundle on Bundle of Holding. Actually, its two bundles, so if you can't get enough Shadow of the Demon Lord, this may be your lucky day :)

In the fast-playing, low-prep Shadow of the Demon Lord, desperate heroes battle strange magic, unhinged cultists, and roaming mobs of undead while humanity's last great empire slides toward oblivion. If you love Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, the Ravenloft and Midnight settings, Joe Abercrombie's The First Law novels, or heavy metal music, get this revived bundle of DRM-free .PDF ebooks and confront the Void That Hungers – or, as star designer Kenneth Hite describes it, "Pure Spikey Caustic Red-Hot Squirming Deliquescing Rugose Gonna-Bite-Your-Fingers-Off Horned Fetid Monstrous EVIL."

For just US$7.95 you get all five titles in this revived offer's Starter Collection (retail value $41) as DRM-free ebooks, including the complete 278-page Shadow of the Demon Lord corebook, the Demon Lord's Companion, the Uncertain Faith sourcebook of divine magic, and the fine introductory adventure Dark Deeds in Last Hope.

And if you pay more than the threshold price of $18.80, you'll level up and also get this revival's entire Bonus Collection with six more delicious gobbets of evil worth an additional $51. What's in these sourcebooks? The titles speak for themselves: Hunger in the Void, Tombs of the Desolation, A Glorious Death, Terrible Beauty, and Exquisite Agony. Plus, Tales of the Demon Lord is a collection of 11 low-prep adventures across the Northern Reach, and the Demon Lord Screen gives you all the charts you need.

 

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

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 - Dolmenwood Tabletop RPG (OSE)

I'm a huge fan of Old School Essentials. OSE hits the sweet spot of familiar and accessible. It truly is a touchstone in the OSR.

Dolemwood is the new setting from the creators of OSE. It looks fantastic, and the OSE rules are included and adjusted for the setting. It launched earlier today on Kickstarter and has already surpassed $625k in funding. I'm going to predict this Kickstarter will hit $2.2 Million. You read it here first ;)

Dolmenwood is a fantasy adventure game set in a lavishly detailed world inspired by the fairy tales and eerie folklore of the British Isles. Like traditional fairy tales, Dolmenwood blends the dark and whimsical, the wondrous and weird.

Streamlined rules and helpful introductory materials guide novice players, while unique new magic and monsters bring a fresh sense of the unknown to veteran role-players. We’re launching the three Dolmenwood core books, plus a range of delectable extras.

The Dolmenwood Player’s Book (A4 size, Smyth-sewn hardcover, 192 pages approx., 1 ribbon marker) contains the complete game rules plus all character options.

• Player’s introduction to the intrigues and mysteries of the forest realm of Dolmenwood.
• Familiar character creation with the six classic stats, level and XP, Hit Points, and Armour Class.
• 6 playable kindreds: goat-headed breggles, starry-eyed elves, tricksome grimalkin cat-fairies, everyday humans, fungus-riddled mosslings, and bat-faced woodgrues.
• 9 character classes: cleric, enchanter, fighter, friar, hunter, knight, magician, minstrel, and thief.
• 4 kinds of magic: mighty arcane workings, fairy glamours and runes, holy prayers to the host of saints, and the odd knacks of mosslings.
• Detailed, flavourful equipment with lists of adventuring gear, armour, weapons, mounts, hounds, inn lodgings, tavern fare, beverages, pipeleafs, fungi, and herbs.
• Simple core rules: roll a d6 or a d20 plus modifiers versus a target number.
• Easy-to-follow procedures for travel, camping, foraging, dungeon delving, encounters, combat, and downtime.
• Full examples of play and introductory materials make the game easy to learn.

 

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

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 - Wind Wraith (OSE Hexcrawl)

I am a setting junkie, even more so than dice, and I love dice. Settings, even if they don't get used directly, open my mind (and my game table) to new ideas and new locals.

The Wind Wraith Kickstarter is a setting book, but it's more than simply a new setting. Shane refers to it as a wavecrawl, which is literally a hexcrawl over the water.

The Wind Wraith Kickstarter is about $17 USC in PDF and $39 in print plus PDF.

Wind Wraith is a generative wavecrawl setting toolkit.

Generate your own flooded fantasy post apocalypse ocean world complete with scattered islands, factions and ancient ruins. Play as refugees of the flood, explorers in a fallen world as they build and upgrade their ship and crew. Unravel the mysterious of the past.

• Island exploration in a gothic waterworld 
• Factions competing over limited resources in stormy seas
• Ancient ruins guarded by rusted arcane constructs 
• Survive dangerous voyages 
• Hire a crew, build and upgrade your ship
• Old School Essentials compatible
• Underwater exploration 
• Magical flora, bacteria and parasites 
• Battle rival crews in naval skirmishes 
• Hunt or be hunted by monstrous leviathans 
• Quick start rules

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

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   

Is AI in our industry really that bad? (Dungeon Alchemist)

So there was this Steam sale last month and even though I really don't use my gaming laptop to play games, I did go ahead and pick up a few cheap games I could play when on the road. While I was at it I noticed that Dungeon Alchemist was something I saved as a "want" in Steam.

I think it was $35, possibly as part of the Steam sale.....it's $45 now. I'm not one to throw down that kind of cash on a tool I'm not sure I'll use, but with all this AI hype I figure.....why not check it out. I've played with Google Bard a little bit, and I see how that could assist with some writing, but not a road I want to go down. AI art.....not just no, but hell no. What I've seen as far as AI art really looks like it's ripping off actual artists, so that's a no-go....

....but Dungeon Alchemist....maybe?

From the Dungeon Alchemist press kit: "Dungeon Alchemist is an AI-powered map making application for fantasy games that allows you to create high-quality maps easily and fast. Players pick a map size, choose a theme, draw some shapes and Dungeon Alchemist will automatically populate the map with walls, lights, doors, windows and objects. Exporting maps for print can be done in seconds, and integration with VTTs is seamless. "

I did NOT go through a tutorial or anything and just started playing with a plain map. Ok, it took the third map until I found something appropriate for what I was trying to do, but that was just a couple of minutes at best. I settled on trying to build a small cottage with an attached brewery with some bee hives and walled-off garden plots. Throw in a small outhouse and a few odds & ends as well.

The program was easy enough to use, but it was obvious that I'm just scratching the surface of what this thing can do. Don't like how the room generated? Just re-do it and it'll add different stuff. If there's an individual "thing" in your room you don't like, just click on it and delete.

While there are a lot of current options as far as room types, the dev team is making more, and it needs more.

An added option, which pretty much blew me away, is that if you plop down a token (there are only a few monster tokes right now) you can actually navigate through your map! Pretty cool feature.

You'll probably notice on the pic above that there is a big cut-away of the hill that one walled field is on. Didn't like that, but I'm a newb with the program and I know that I selected the option to have all my construction on the same level as the water.

I haven't figured out if I like how these things print out yet, because I don't have a full-color printer....well I do actually have a large format one, but I don't want to use the ink. I'm more interested in having this program for VTT use. I didn't see underground caverns.....wait one...

Oh crap, the cave creation is awesome! If I wasn't already at the end of this post I'd re-do everything with a focus on caves. Uh...yeah......I'm of the opinion that my $35 was worthwhile for making some quick caves & caverns...and I like hand-drawing my caves. I'm also a big fan of this tidbit: "Dungeon Alchemist will be updated over time at no extra cost."