Top 3 of July 2024

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The Top 3 articles of July 2024 are Cardboard Diagnosis, Twisted Taverns and Improving Languages.

Cardboard Diagnosis

The most popular article of last month was Cardboard Diagnosis. If I had to hazard a reason why, it is because of the three trainwrecks of gaming experience. While it isn’t fun to experience a complete failure of expectations in the moment, they’re fun to laugh at later. I know there’s a cadre of enthuiasts that want to see the world burn when it comes to reading r/RPGHorrorStories. I understand the baser instinct; you get a manageable amount of ick, none of the social fallout and all of the gory details.

With that in mind, I’ll leave you with another story that made me quit a Commander group. Commander is a format of Magic the Gathering (1993) that I decided to quit entirely after Wizards of the Coast hired Pinkertons to intimidate a player. I had liked tinkering with my decks and one of the strategies I was trying out was Infect; it makes your creatures deal damage in the form of Poison counters to players. 10 Poison counters and you lose. One of the players was playing a life gain deck and when he realized that it didn’t matter how much life he had, he was still dead if I managed to count to ten, he got so upset he picked up his deck, threw it across the room and left the store. If you are unaware, Magic cards are worth real tangible money; so much so, there’s effectively an unregulated stock market. While I appreciate he was kind enough to throw his deck instead of mine, that’s still deciding to damage his own cards because he happened to come across a bad matchup. To clarify, this was not for the World Championship, there were no stakes. It was a casual pick-up game.

I never went back to that group.

Twisted Taverns Review

The second most popular article is my review of Ghostfire Gaming’s The Seeker’s Guide to Twisted Taverns. My main argument against purchasing in the article was that too many of the places were almost too fantastical; such as, an inter-dimensional mobile hotel, a castle under the sea, a train in what is traditionally a medieval setting or an inn you serve up after a Total Party Kill. There was also the issue of the boss of a dungeon being misprinted, which I did fix with my Patreon.
My argument in favour of purchasing Twisted Taverns is that the places are high quality chronological dungeons. Instead of moving to the next room to fight the baddie, you’re given quest chains that are pretty good to sprinkle into a Sandbox game. The NPCs and art is impeccable but it is The Seeker who is charming between the various videos Ghostfire Gaming has dedicated to them.

Between the pros and cons, I concluded that if three of the 17 unique places attracted your eye, it was worth a purchase. The five NPCs included in the back can easily be slotted into any dive your players decide to drink in. The best part? As your sandbox expands, you have the opportunity to put more of these places to work. I instantly backed the Kickstarter project for interesting travelling merchants, as I am confident in their product.

If you wish to buy Twisted Taverns, here’s a Drive Thru RPG Link.

Improving Languages

Lastly, but certainly not least, the central thesis to the Improving Languages article is to to remove Common from your game. While lingua fracas are possible, it should matter what languages you pick. That’s why in the article, I discuss bonuses you can attribute to different languages. However, my primary reason is that games are people voluntarily choosing to have obstacles to create fun and memorable events. An example from my game that completely broke me, possibly dealing real Psychic damage in what our group has referred to as the Toilet Incident. If Common was in my game, it never would have happened.

The party was in a savannah when I triggered a Hex Feature; a Fortress was teed up. The party approached in the middle of the night instead of waiting for daybreak, but they made it obvious with a torch. The players talked to the guards and it quickly became apparent that nobody had a common language between the two groups. One of the players had previously spent 700 gold on buying a Scroll of Tongues. He decided to let another player ask the questions and cast Tongues on that player.

If you approached a fortress bearing an unknown flag at night and now could suddenly communicate with the guards, what would you ask?

Would it be “Can I use your toilet?”

I think it took me over 10 seconds to replace the hamster that powers my brain, I was so stunned. I had the guard be surprised and say “Just go out by those trees.” But still… The player who spent 700 gold on Tongues was both laughing and annoyed which is an unusual facial expression you don’t get from playing online.

For your Consideration

I would recommend checking out my review of directsun’s Aberrant Reflections. The module is incredible. It teases your players with treasure that they need to solve puzzles to do so, including a djinn’s lamp for Wish. directsun has gone on record that his dungeon is inspired by the Legend of Zelda puzzle dungeons.

As a Hex Feature, it is awesome, as it has an equilibrium that the party will probably disrupt. There’s a bunch of nifty magical items within. There are monsters unique to the dungeon, which means if your players are close by and lost, they can orient themselves by Random Encounters.

Look, it was so good it made me halt development on my own dungeon because I realized I needed to do a lot more work on it because of how easy it was to read.
If you wish to buy Aberrant Reflections, here is the Drive Thru RPG link.