Today or tomorrow might see a double post day. Look on it as making up for no post yesterday. Which means I skipped day 8 of RPGaDAY2019.

In the meantime you have a post for Day 9 to suffer. And the theme/inspiration for today is…

This is a toughie. Critical can be interpreted a few ways. It can be used negatively, saying something is bad. It can mean something is of importance. Or finally it can be giving judgement or an opinion.

So I’m going to try and give an answer for each definition below.

Negative – I’m going to be unpopular for this one. My criticism is the likes of Critical Roll with the voice actors, or the one on Caffeine which hired actors that are good at improv. Whilst this may make good viewing, in my experience I don’t think this gives a realistic view of an RPG game. Not everyone does the voice, feels confident to do them, or are that “expressive” or hamming it up. And by that I mean the majority of players.

Important – this is probably the one everyone will go with for their entries for today. It’s the easiest of the three definitions. I’m going to choose a category of magic items for my important. I’m running a campaign that is at sea and island hopping. At some point the adventurers will end up having to go underwater. Maybe visit some merfolk, explore a wreck, or have to deal to rescue some-one from the sahuagin.

However they end up on the sea bed my adventurers will need some way to breathe underwater. This is where magic items that allow them to breathe underwater are pretty critical to their mission. These items could be manta ray cloaks or helms of underwater action. Possibly pressure capsules, or potions of water breathing.

Without these magical items the adventurers would drown, or worse not get to experience the underwater world. That makes them critical in my opinion.

Opinion/Judgement – this is probably the easiest one of these for me. So far after the sessions where I have been the DM, I have written posts that give my opinion/judgment on how I think the session went. In these posts I try and be honest and reflect on the session. These are notes for me to help me improve as a DM.

Ok not a great post. But hopefully though provoking.

Today’s inspiring word for RPGaDA2019 is…

I thought I’d look briefly at how my players will experience the familiar in our campaign.

SPOILER ALERT TO MY ADVENTURERS! The following part of the post contains spoilers for the up and coming campaign. You may want to avoid this post and join me in a future one.

My players will be experiencing a bit of the familiar, even deja vu in our session 2 of the campaign when they exit the pirates lair that I created, and have fought their way through to come out in a tomb. A tomb with several sarcophagi in, and a passage leading south in the southern wall of the room.

Hopefully for one or two of the group this will seem oddly familar.

The party will have emerged into the secret burial chamber from the Matt Colville one shot he did that kicked off the whole being a DM series that he does. Three members of the party did that one shot as a taster session earlier in the year.

The only real threat to the party this time though is the skeletons still in the tomb, waiting for one of the party to get greedy and take the sword being held by an effigy of a long dead knight on one of the sarcophagi.

Otherwise as they work their way through the tomb they will come across the long decayed remains of the goblins and bugbear that they fought so valiantly in the one shot. It was their heroic efforts to save the child, and clearing the tomb that allowed the pirates to move in and use t as a secret entrance to their lair.

I hoping those players will like this little return to the one shot. Although it doesn’t link directly location wise. I’ve moved the tomb thousands of miles to a totally different location. I thought it would be a fun addition and end to their first dungeon in the campaign.

Ok I didn’t do this #RPGaDAY2019 yesterday whose prompt was Space. Playing MtG and not having anything really to contribute are my excuse for not posting anything. Although when I looked at the hash tag on twitter folks were interrupting it as the gaming space. Although that’s probably the angle I’d take as well. I thought I might have seen more talk about space themed RPG’s. When I didn’t see any, which doesn’t mean there wasn’t. Just that this old man didn’t see them.

Today’s prompt is …

Which is an interesting one. And I’m looking forward to seeing what people’s contributions to this one are.

Here is my contribution…

For me D&D and any fantasy based RPG is a mish mash of many influences. A few of them can be described as ancient.

Let’s start with the easiest and probably the most influential Tolkien. Who as we all know was a renowned scholar in old English. And throughout his work the influence of his subject specialism can be found. Tolkien even wrote an English translation of Beowulf. But as you read Tolkien’s work, there feels a depth and history within the pages. However although that’s the side I’ve discussed so far. Probably the biggest and easiest to identify influences are the races and classes, make up of a party (the fellowship of the ring) and the medieval feel.

The world that the likes of D&D and others are set in are often described as medieval European fantasy. And although it may not have the feudal society. I would argue (over a pint at the pub) that as a point of reference to describe the look, level of sophistication etc of the setting it’s a fair starting point. Especially to those that have not played the game before.

However the influences don’t stop there.

We only have to look at some of the monsters that adventurers can come across to see them. For instance Greek mythology with hydras, medusa, and minotaurs to name ones that spring to mind as I write this post.

D&D goes even further back than what would be considered ancient on the Monster front with dinosaurs. Yeah you can have a T-Rex stomping and running amok in your campaign.

Within my homebrew campaign set within the D&D realm of Faerûn it has been heavily influenced by the Ancient Greek stories of Pytheas and Jason and the Argonauts. Some of the islands my adventurers will come across will be inhabited by people that have a heavy Norse influence.

Definitely within my campaign the boats used to travel between islands and explore the seas are more Norse influenced with the use of long boats. Architecture (depending on the communities main influence) for the campaign on the islands will be either medieval European or Norse.

One thing I have found is that as a new DM, as I get further into the campaign and preparing the upcoming session the more I’m learning about these influences. Like Tolkien I want names whether they are of a person or place to feel authentic. Luckily Gygax wrote a book on names, and Xanathar’s Guide to Everything have lists of names that can be used based on ethnicity and race. A bit of google magic helps me find pages to make place names that sound Nordic. So I’m learning history whether real or mythic as I go along, whether it be Medieval English history and legends (which I will include the Norse stuff here) or it’s Greek mythology.

It’s the mix of these ancient influences that help make D&D and any fantasy setting a rich and rewarding world to explore. They definitely provide a gold mine of ideas for campaigns and adventures.

What influences have you noticed within D&D?

Somehow #RPGaDAY2019 appeared in my twitter timeline this morning. I was curious what this was, so I clicked the hashtag to find out.

In the responses was the image below.

The image seemed to explain it pretty succinctly.

It also seemed a pretty cool idea.

So I thought I’d jump in and write this post for day 4!

What? This post doesn’t count even though it’s technically sharing that this Twitter/internet created thing is a thing?

Ok I get it, you want more.

Well regular readers of this blog will know I’ve only just become a DM/GM. And have been suffering posts where I have been writing about my session prep. Which have been basically me brain dumping and waffling on about ideas and stuff for the home brew campaign that I am running.

So here I present my poor notes for my session 1 of the campaign.

In the wake of Pytheas Campaign session 1 Notes

You will need the map created by Matt Colville (for new readers when I talk D&D I usually try and work in mentioning Colville at some point) for his intro/taster adventure he created. You can pick that up here.

I’ve removed all the copyrighted stuff. Well 90% of it. Although there are some paragraphs that are taken from a D&D Beyond Encounter Of The Week that I altered for use in my campaign left in.

If you have any questions about the notes, leave a comment below I’ll gladly answer them.

So I hope you liked what I shared. I can’t guarantee I’ll do this every day. But I will do more for sure.