Creature Codex

I was all set to skip this book - as I said in my review of "Tome of Beasts", I really have enough monsters for 'general' use, and wasn't really in the market for a "Tome of Beasts 2" (which is pretty much what this is). However, a really good Black Friday deal saw me picking up a copy of this book cheap.

As noted, this book is very much a "Tome of Beasts 2" - 432 pages of monsters, rendered in glorious full colour, and all at a fairly competitive price. So if you liked that book, you'll probably like this one for the same reasons. If you didn't like that book, don't bother with this one. And if you don't have that book, then get "Tome of Beasts" first and then decide. ("Creature Codex" assumes that you have and can reference "Tome of Beasts" in several places. It can certainly be used by itself, but does probably work better as an additional, rather than alternative, source of monsters.)

If making recommendations for 'monster' books for 5e, this would be my third pick: "Monster Manual", then "Tome of Beasts", then "Creature Codex", then "Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes", "Volo's Guide to Monsters", and finally "5th Edition Foes". (Indeed, at this point I would skip that last book entirely, and think very carefully before picking up either "Volo's..." or "Mordenkainen's...")

My recommendation here is necessarily conditional. If you're looking for more monsters, this book is an excellent buy. If you're looking for specific WotC-owned monsters, then of course this won't do the job for you. Likewise, if you're looking for monsters that will appear in WotC products, or on the DM's Guild, this book isn't going to help. And if you're looking for anything other than monsters, this isn't the book for you. It does one thing, but does that one thing extremely well.

And that's that. As I said before, I'm now not in the market for any more 'general' monster books. I may pick up another "Guide To..." book from Wizards of the Coast, depending on the specific monsters that are present, and would certainly consider a 'themed' book of monsters. But for general use... well, the Black Friday deal would now need to be exceptional.

"Storm King's Thunder" in Actual Play

It's hard to gauge where we really are in terms of our progress through "Storm King's Thunder" - the campaign starts quite tightly, sprawls out into a very loose "exploration" phase, and then comes back together for a tightly-plotted finale. We're some way into that middle section, and I have no really clear idea how much is still to go.

However, we've done enough for me to have some thoughts about how it works in actual play. Some of these observations apply to D&D 5e in general, and some apply to "Storm King's Thunder" in particular.

Firstly, "milestone advancement" sucks. And the decision to use this in "Storm King's Thunder" also sucks - there just isn't enough material to really justify the rate of advancement of the PCs. This is probably a fundamental problem in WotC's big "storyline" books in general, since the page count almost certainly doesn't allow for enough adventure for the supposed level range of the campaign. Especially if the book must also contain bootstrap material to get the PCs from 1st level up to some nominal starting point.

That said, the bootstrap material in "Storm King's Thunder" proved to be surprisingly useful - my PCs started the adventure midway through 4th level, so having a few more bits and pieces to drop in to bring them up to 5th was quite useful. I still think those pages could probably have been better used (since I could have gotten another adventure from somewhere else), but I should note that I did use much of that material.

The second big observation I have is that D&D 5e, like every prior edition, really falls down on its exploration, and especially overland travel, rules. I've mentioned this before, and it's an area that I've been able to 'borrow' some material from elsewhere to plug some of the gaps (have I mentioned that I'm a big fan of the Angry GM's work?), but it's really something that I shouldn't have to significantly rewrite to get a good experience. That's pretty poor. "Storm King's Thunder", of course, isn't to blame for this weakness in 5e, but it does serve to highlight it really well (or badly).

Thirdly, I've been rather frustrated by the interconnections in the adventure, or rather the lack thereof. The PCs start in one of three places, where there is some sort of inciting event. That's fine. Then the PCs get some number of quests (zero to five) from the surviving NPCs from that event, which lead them to start travelling. And at some point, they'll run out of quests.

And then?

Well, the next thing is an encounter with a particular NPC. Which is fine and all, except that that encounter needs to happen on the road, while the PCs' final quest will leave them in one of the many settlements in the region.

So there are two problems there:

• It's entirely possible that the PCs may come out of the inciting event with no quests to pursue. It's fair to say that that's rather problematic!
  
• The DM needs to plan to insert that key encounter some time before the final quest runs out. But that might not be convenient, and it might not be at a point where the PCs are actually ready for the next part of their quest. Not to mention, of course, that that encounter could always go really badly...

Speaking of those "zero to five quests", I had initially thought that this would lead to a bunch of interesting choices - do we go West for quest one, East for quest two, or whatever? It turned out, in fact, that the answer was to go East for quest one, then further East for quest two, and so on. That's a shame. All that said, we've had a fair amount of fun out of the campaign so far. And what it has allowed me to do, which is quite good, is to use it to plug some of my own material into the campaign to keep the group engaged. Which has been fun, even if it's not what I'm looking for in a published adventure. Anyway, my conclusions from this are several:

• My initial assessment of this adventure was right - as a setting guide it's actually pretty sound, but as an adventure it's poor. And since I paid for an adventure, I can't recommend it.
  
• D&D needs at least one more edition. There probably shouldn't be many changes to PC powers, spells, monsters, or magic items, but it could really use a significant revision of the exploration and social interaction pillars, because those are still sorely lacking.
  
• I'm rather looking forward to our next campaign. And, actually, I'm quite glad that we did this one first, as there are quite a few "lessons learned" that I wouldn't have understood without the experience granted by SKT. So that's good.

And that's it.

Game Angry: How to RPG the Angry Way

I saw the advert for this on Thursday and felt the need to buy a copy. Since then I've been powering through it.

"Game Angry: How to RPG the Angry Way" is, simply put, the second best book on GMing I've ever read. (The best is the old "Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide" for AD&D 2nd Edition.) In 170ish pages, he covers a lot of ground, starting with a basic introduction to RPGs, a then a slightly longer discussion of running a first adventure, and then an even longer discussion of "advanced topics", including such things as pacing, running good scenes and encounters, building stories, player drives, troubleshooting, and building campaigns.

Basically, this book distills down a whole lot of the material from the Angry GM website, brings it all together, and presents it in an easily-digested format. It is very highly recommended, especially but not only for new GMs.

Unfortunate Timing?

Friday's game featured a moment where the PCs discovered "two magical items rolled on table B". Which was nice - always good to dig out those tables and see what you get. (No, seriously, I do quite like that approach to treasure in 5e.)

One of the two items was yet another potion, which is fine, but the other was a bag of holding.

Which is a pain on two counts: Firstly, I had been about to bring in an encumbrance rule for the rest of the campaign, notably including tracking of rations. But the BoH makes that utterly pointless - the party can now just carry whatever they need anyway, so tracking rations becomes just some pointless book-keeping.

Secondly, in the absence of an encumbrance system, the BoH is itself completely pointless - it solves a problem that the party doesn't actually face. Huzzah!

The upshot of this is that I'm now not going to bother introducing the encumbrance system, and therefore not bother with the tracking of rations. Which is slightly unfortunate, but so be it. It's probably better used in the next campaign anyway.

Ah, but the timing, though...

My Favourite Unloved Game

This morning I was reminded once again of my favourite unloved game. I should note that this is not my favourite game, nor even one of my top five. However, this is a game that I enjoyed playing a great deal but that pretty much bombed, almost nobody ever played, and rather fewer people particularly enjoyed. Oh, but I like it.

The game is "Werewolf: the Wild West".

"Werewolf: the Apocalypse" was a White Wolf game that cast the PCs as werewolves (obviously) - servants of a cosmic force called the Wyld - who were engaged in a hopeless battle against the forces of the Wyrm (the cosmic force of decay) and the Weaver (the cosmic force of order - a being that had been corrupted by the Wyrm in the modern age). I never really took to that game, though I'm not sure quite why.

"Werewolf: the Wild West" took much the same concept but transplanted the game back in time 150 years. Here, the Weaver had not yet been corrupted but was very much in the ascendance as the frontier was tamed, the railroad was built, and so on.

And, of course, the game fused the concepts of that hopeless battle with the tropes of the wild west. (This was, of course, before I realised that D&D itself was much closer to being a pseudo-WW game than anything pseudo-medieval.)

So I spent quite a lot of time watching lots of westerns and soaking in the appropriate material, quite a lot of time drawing up ideas for games, and quite a lot of time planning one-shots. And I think I played the game all of twice. It was fun, and I think the one-shots were well received... but the game never really got traction with any group I played with. It was always placed behind D&D and Vampire amongst the games that people wanted to play, and it was never quite one that I really pushed for. And so it has sat on a shelf for twenty years, unplayed but not quite unloved.

Oh, but I did so enjoy it!

Labour-saving Tools That Aren't

The scan-and-shred exercise reached a new and annoying phase at the weekend - I found myself dealing with the materials generated by a Vampire chronicle I ran in the early 2000's called "Shades of Black". It was actually quite a good campaign, and quite fun revisiting the old character sheets.

But what was so annoying about this one was that, unlike many of the others, I had generated all of my campaign materials, including a great many NPC stats, on a PC in the first place. So the scanning effort should have been minimal - note any changes, and then get rid of a big pile of paper.

Unfortunately, where it went wrong was that I had generated all those notes using an old electronic tool for V:tM that White Wolf put out at the time. That was a decade and a half, and two PCs, ago. And the problem was that the tool saved the generated files at some random location on my hard drive in some custom format... and of course the files were therefore lost when that PC was retired. (I have no idea if the tools would even work with my new PC, or if they're dependent on something in an old Windows that has now been retired. Funnily enough, I have no burning desire to find out.)

The upshot of this is that the "labour-saving" tool generated an additional job for me to do. Great.

(In fairness, I think it did save me some effort at the time, in that the notes were easier to generate and format using the tool. Slightly.)

I also spent a little time scanning character sheets from a run-through of "The Sunless Citadel" that I ran when 3e first came out. These, similarly, were generated by an electronic tool that again saved the files in an arbitrary location and in a custom format - and so were also lost in a PC transition.

The upshot is that I've more or less come to the conclusion that the best tools for RPG use on PCs are pretty much just Word for campaign notes, editable PDF forms for PC storage, and PDFs of the books for viewing. Anything that uses a custom format is just more hassle than it's worth - even if you can just print the resulting data straight to PDF, in doing so you probably lose the ability to easily edit the resulting file.

There's no great underlying point to all this, of course. Mostly it's just a rant.