YouTube Video

Let’s Be Honest: As DMs We’re Just Making S#!& Up!

by
Transcript

You guys are making your way up the crowded street, cobblestones wet under a soft rain, the sound of bells and cries of seagulls coming from the harbor ahead. You spot the distinct golden sails of the Queen’s ship amongst the forest of masts in the distance. Your target, the galleon that ugly thieves’ guild enforcer swore holds the shipment of dream dust you’ve been after for weeks.

Is there a lotta people on this street?

Yeah, it’s, uh, it’s late afternoon, it’s fairly crowded, traders and dock workers, merchants and city folk doing their thing.

Excellent! One should never let a good opportunity go to waste. Uh, do I happen to see any uh rich folk walking around?

Ugh. The ship is right there!

Roll a Perception check.

Well this day keeps getting better and better, that’s a 21!

Sure, you see one or two figures that sorta stand out, they’ve got maybe a little retinue of guards and there’s one wearing a pretty extravagant set of robes, very expensive, and his attendant holds a silk umbrella up to keep the drizzle off him.

A silk umbrella. In the rain. Yeah, that’s my mark!

Gah! I knew it, I knew it!

He looks wealthy, no doubt, and his four guards kinda support that notion. Do your thing.

Let’s go baby, go! Uh, a one?  A nat 1?

I told you to put that die in the dice jail!

Dang it!

Okay, so you sidle up the merchant’s group, slip between the guards and at just that moment, the merchant looks down at your hand stuck in his robes. He looks from your hand up to your face, you guys lock eyes. You get the feeling you might be … in trouble.

I get the feeling you’re stalling. Little bit.

All right. Role for initiative, as the merchant grins at you and whips back his embroidered cloak to reveal a torso wrapped in black bandages and a hole the size of a cannonball where his heart should be. His four guards are whirling and turning about, bristling with freshly drawn steel!

Welcome to D&D, where most of the time, we’re just making shit up.

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we just contradict previous videos and just … make stuff up! Except for thanking our patrons, that’s always sincere and we never make that up. Cheers!

All right, this is just sort of a bunch of random small tips for new DMs on how to get comfortable with living on the fly when you’re running a DnD – or any tabletop rpg – session.

There are of course lots of reasons for this, but a main one is to keep from railroading your players in uncomfortable ways and to not sweat how your players navigate the world. Playing dnd means playing in a truly open world and your players can theoretically do anything they want at any time. And so can you.

There is one thing I hope everyone can take away from this and it’s a concept championed by the super awesome Hankerin Ferinale on the Runehammer youtube channel. It’s one that I initially felt truly hesitant about, but in practice, I’ve found him to be right. And that’s the notion that you can be honest with your players about essentially not knowing what’s next. If, and when, that happens. If you’re in a spot that’s way off any map or notes you have, you can just … tell ‘em. You guys are all playing a game together and decent individuals are not gonna fire you as their Dungeon Master just because you let ‘em know you might be discovering the world along with them. 

I did truly sorta bristle at this idea at first. And I don’t think you wanna overdo it, or, over share your inherent position of con man but once in a while it’s okay to break the immersion by letting your players know you might need a minute to, you know, come up with what’s next. I typically feel like I want to maintain the illusion for the players no matter what, that whatever they’re doing or wherever they’re going already exists in some way outside of ourselves. But of course the reality is we’re all just making something new moment to moment. 

We’re just making shit up. 

And that’s literally the core activity of this entire category of games. So, the moral is: don’t stress, just have fun. 

Do you have to already be a good bullshit artist to DM or GM a game? Not at all, you can learn as you go. There’s this thing with writers, the notion of being a “plotter” or a “pantser”. Pantser means flying by the seat of your pants. Or writing by the seat of your pants – much less cool but you know.

Plotters are folks who maybe start their writing projects with full outlines or synopsis. Synopses? Synopsises?Whatever, they like to map out a story structure or plot before writing a single word of actual story. And a lot of times in my life I’ve wished I was a plotter, but for better or worse, I definitely lean more towards the panster way of things. Check my 401k if you think I’m kidding. 

Let’s say you’ve got an adventure going, you’re running something someone else wrote or you’ve got your own notes and maps laying out all your points of interest and plot points and NPCs, et cetera. And you’re thinking “what the hell is this dude jabbering about? I’m not making anything up, I got all these piles of information right in front of me.” And I’m sure you do. I’m also 100% sure that at some point your players are gonna do something or go somewhere that takes them off the rails, you’re gonna have to – say it with me now – make shit up.

Sometimes I feel the best, most accurate allegory for what a Dungeon Master is doing while running a game is summed up in this Wallace and Grommit clip.

That’s what DMing is to me. So there’s no reason to freak out if your players don’t talk to Mister X to get the map to Location Y. If your players ignore Mister X, they are probably gonna run into Mrs. Z, and when they do, lo and behold, she’s got this strange map.

Or, you know, you’ve described for your players the ruined monastery at the top of the mist-shrouded mountain just outside the town. The one the townsfolk have been complaining about because of the ghost and the ghoulish … ghouls running around in the the courtyard, wreaking havoc on the local flora and fauna. And then your players snare themselves in a scuffle with the town bully and his drinking buddies and there’s a chase and all of a sudden you’ve spent 3 hours making up different locations in this town for your players to go crash through and fight in.

And of course, underneath that monastery on your map is your multi-level dungeon, completely prepped and ready to eat your players alive. It’s full of bad guys and traps and most importantly, treasure! There’s no way you’re gonna let that location go to waste. 

So when your players disregard every hint and NPC that begs them to go and end the ghost haunting the monastery and instead decide to follow some throw-away news item you conjured up as flavor detail in the local paper – do medieval villages have local newspapers? No, probably not, but this is fantasy. Leave me alone. 

When your players go walkabout investigating the rumors of that made-up criminal enterprise working out of the basement of the local tavern, well, when they sneak into that basement, they find it empty, aside from the barrels of ale and sacks of dry goods … and that one weird iron door set in the furthest corner of the room. Of course, that door now happens to lead to a multi-level dungeon full of bad guys and traps and most importantly, treasure!

Now, it might just be that I possess a certain skill that you simply don’t have. Right? And that skill is called “painting oneself into a corner”. I often excel at that kind of paint work. Because I like to riff on open-world descriptions, I often put things into the players’ minds that to me are just off-the-cuff flavor text but to them, are subtly shiny clues and hints. But it’s all good, wherever they go, my job is to make sure there’s something for their next foot to land on when they take a step. 

Maybe DnD is really just one big trust exercise.

Anyway, conjuring up images and things does come relatively easy to me. That’s not to say they are logical or have any sort of depth to them, I typically have to work to make my made-up nonsense make sense for the players. And you might be saying, “hey man, conjuring up images is NOT relatively easy for me!”. And that’s okay too, you don’t have to imagine fresh stuff all the time, you can rip stuff off from movies and books and video games, you can just swipe to your heart’s content. You’re not infringing on copyright or copping out or failing at Dungeon Mastering when you’re making stuff up on the fly. You’re just playing a game with friends. You’re giving players ambiance and things to consider. 

And something else that comes up quite a bit is that your players often end up becoming an unwitting source of inspiration for you. They’re gonna say things and do things that you didn’t think of and those things can immediately become part of your imagined scenarios and world. Even when you’re working with written material, you should always keep in mind that you can change any of that written stuff at any time in any way you feel like. Obviously you’re hopefully working towards giving your players a good time, so it’s not like you’re gonna change that orc in room 23 to a dragon that’s ninety times more powerful than your players … I mean, unless you sorta want ‘em to run away in a different direction, you know, there’s that.

Everything’s on the table when you’re running a game. It’s up to you to tailor your imagination to what you think your players enjoy and you just gotta pay attention to how they react to what you’re laying down for ‘em. 

You could technically run an entire combat encounter without ever rolling a single die for your monsters. Now, don’t call the rpg police on me, jeez. You could just make up whether the monster hits or not, you could make up a number for how much damage they do, you can make up some weird power they have or some weird action, you could literally do all that on the fly. Now of course you want to fit what you’re making up into the structure of the game rules so the players have ways to engage and interact fairly with everything, sure. I’m just saying, we can acknowledge the bottom line here. That running a DnD session or a Blades in the Dark session or a Pathfinder session or a Shadowrun session, or a whatever rpg session is truly, at it’s core, just making shit up.

I’ll point out one caveat here, and this is just sort of par for the course, whether you’re making stuff up on the fly or running a prebuilt adventure: whatever is put out to the group becomes part of the imaginary world, and consistency is something to be cognizant of. So when you move that multi-level dungeon from the mountain monastery to the tavern basement, you basically gotta make a note of that detail, cause now that’s officially where the dungeon is. Cause now you’re made up nonsense is part of a consensual group hallucination. That sounds self-explanatory when discussing something huge like a dungeon location but it’s the smaller details that are more difficult to keep track of and some note-taking is definitely in order during a game. Just for items or details that are of particular interest to the shape of your imaginary world and it’s characters.

So, go run a game. And make stuff up. Or don’t. Use somebody else’s made up stuff. Just have fun and don’t stress too much. 

See ya!

Speed Crafting Tabletop Terrain

by
Transcript

All right, today I wanna kick off a bit of a bigger project and experiment with something a little new, as far as video format goes. Basically I wanna try a bit of a mini-series. This is essentially gonna be a test to see how this format might work. This is a plan I’ve had for a while and well, we gotta see how it works. It’s also a cool, incentivized way to help me “get things done”, hobby-wise. And yes I’m a little trepidatious about the whole thing, for two reasons: time frame and labor breakdown.

But, you know, to get somewhere you gotta start walking? Even if you find out later it was in the wrong direction. This is the way.

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we plan a mini-series! And we salute our patrons for their patronage, it’s always highly appreciated.

All right, today we’re building a pile of scatter terrain. Is there such a thing as speed-crafting? If so, that’s what I’m after. But first, let me introduce the mini-series thing.

As most of you know, I have a “topic schedule” I try to maintain with videos. That’s it right there. So what I’m envisioning is a 4-episode skirmish related mini-series within the main schedule. This video and the subsequent three skirmish and crafting/painting videos will make up that mini-series, which is all about playing my first solo game – or any game – of Joe McCullough’s The Silver Bayonet. 

I’m gonna start with the first solo scenario in the main book. It’s logical, right? I’m pretty sure Osprey is releasing the first expansion book for The Silver Bayonet right around the time this video drops, and I’ve got that on pre-order, but I won’t have it for this first game series.

This is the scenario and for terrain we just need lots of forest scatter, basically trees and rocks. Not super exciting as far as terrain goes, but you know, having more trees and rocks can’t be a bad thing, right? And to be honest, I don’t have that much general scatter terrain ready to go anyway, most of my stuff is mostly in base material form, meaning, I have a bunch of foam sheets and basing material ready to be made into terrain.

In the next skirmish topic video, we’ll build our warband on paper and select some miniatures, et cetera and then in the following painting video we’ll paint the warband – which I’m not really looking forward to doing, but you know, we’ll face our fears together … or we’ll face my fears together – and then we’ll play the warband in the scenario. 

All right, have I hit the appropriate procrastination meter for everyone? Sweet! Let’s get this show on the road.

First thing we need are bases for the scatter terrain, and of course I cut and shape these outta Sintra. What’s that? Are you actually asking me what my plan is? That’s a bold assumption for you to make. That I would, you know, have a plan. Where do you think you are? Every other professional hobby youtube channel on the internet? Cause you ain’t. You’re here at Tabletop Alchemy, where we’re allergic to plans.

But in lieu of having plans, what I do have are a bunch of sticks and toy trees and tree armatures and basing materials and stacks of foam and some new glues and a desire to work fast and loose. 

So I’m gonna start with making some trees. I’ve had this bag of tree armatures for quite a while and I know they are pretty typical in the hobby space, but I’ve never worked with ‘em before. They have bendable wire buried in the plastic and you just sorta twist and turn and bend them to make tree shapes you like. There are hundreds of videos out there about how to make custom trees from scratch, and while those can certainly turn out to be much better looking in the end, and probably cheaper financially-speaking, I’m balancing my time against my wallet – I got a whole video on that topic right here – but yeah, I just can’t be bothered at this particular moment to craft up a bunch of custom trees. So Woodland Scenics it is. And guess what? I ain’t even gonna paint these trees’ trunks! How dare I?! Remember, this is all about speed crafting!

So in choosing some of the Sintra bases to hold trees and others to hold rocks, I decided that a couple should hold both trees and rocks. Look out, I’m a daredevil! 

All right, I just cut up some foam and stick a few slabs on a few bases and I succeed this time in remembering to create spaces for the miniatures to stand on. I add in some chunks of quarter inch cork board, just, you know, just because. 

These little bits of foam here I’m putting down specifically to plug these pre-fab pine trees into, cause they don’t have their own bases. Little hot glue will hold them just fine. These are actually pretty cool and affordable trees, I got ‘em on Amazon years ago and I had like 5 left to use today. 

Now’s time to make the rock scatter. Using chunks of 1” and 1/2” XPS foam, I just made stacks that are 2 – 3” tall. I thought having a little stonehenge style bridge would be cool, so you know why not? I make sure there’s enough room for a mini to go underneath the big rock and then move on to building up and texturing a few more rock stacks, again always keeping in mind flat areas for miniatures to stand on. I know having some like larger rock formations would be really cool on the table, but I’ll look forward to doing some bigger terrain pieces in the future. For now, I’m keeping in mind the way a lot of skirmish games count half-movement for climbing objects. So typically a figure with six inches of movement can climb 3” in height on their turn. So most of this scatter terrain can be climbable in a single activation. I textured all the foam with chunks of glass rock and didn’t spend too much time, but made sure I covered every exposed surface again as fast as possible.

Now on to the foliage. I really like these fall colors, I picked this set up on a whim one day and finally we get to use it. So this stuff is basically sea foam, which a lot of scale modelers use for trees and shrubs, it’s had colored flock already applied. I think you can just use chunks of this as stand alone trees but it’s pretty spindly and not nearly durable enough for tabletop play. I’m sure it works fine for display purposes but you know we’re making terrain for Dorito-fingered gamers here. So I just break this stuff apart, and pick out usable patches of it and use the tacky glue to hit the armature branches and just stick it on there. And actually when a tree is fully covered in this stuff, it looks pretty convincing. 

Now I have buckets of clump flock in various green colors and I wanted to try to keep costs down on this exercise and use stuff I already have. So I’m using the tacky glue again, I stick some of these small clumps on an armature. I’m not sure why I thought this would be a good idea, because logically doing what I did would create this monstrosity right here. Now, sure, if you wanna play Kill Team on a Dr. Suess table, this is a perfect way to go. But I wanna try again. And I get a bright idea: I’ll mix up some glue and water and modpodge and soak these small clumps and make a little porridge out of ‘em and I bought some wax paper to put spoonfuls of this down on and I’ll just make my own foliage clusters. What could go wrong? 

Well, I’m sure most of you can extrapolate what I ignored. The main thing being the flat bottoms of these cottage cheese clusters. I did kinda think of that and wondered if I could basically sandwich the tree branches between clumps, which would actually work, but the main problem with doing this nonsense here is the stupid drying time. I had to let this stuff sit for basically 24 hours. And then of course I had the flat undersides and the little ribbons of dried glue but those are okay, we can cover those with more flock after they’re on the trees. But yeah, this was a frustrating turn of events. Too long to work with and it just looks like more Dr. Suess terrain. There are definitely applications for this kinda clumping thing but it’s not what I need for the trees.

As luck would have it, while I’m trying to do this little series, I’m also getting slammed with a bunch of day job video production work. When it rains, it pours. In this case, floods. In between droughts. Kinda just like California in general. The life of a freelancer. But, also as luck would have it, a bunch of my gigs occurred about an hour and half drive from where I live and happened to be right down the street from a pretty big hobby store. So after one of my shoots I went shopping. And I picked up a couple more of the sea foam kits in various green colors and I got this, which turns out to be exactly what I didn’t know I was looking for. It’s called foliage clusters and it’s basically a brick of textured flock that hasn’t been pulled apart yet. And I’d never have known to even look for it cause I’ve never heard of it before. 

And yep, for the price vs the work of gluing up dumb custom clusters, this stuff is definitely a winner. You can tease it apart to make large clusters that are still inherently connected, so glueing them to the branches works totally fine. In the end, for me, it was the fastest way to fill out one of these tree armatures. But that said, the sea foam product is much better looking, detail-wise. But for speed crafting and less mess, foliage cluster foam is the way to go. 

But I have these new colors of sea foam so we gotta build trees outta this too. I like mixing the colors up whenever I can, this definitely adds to the overall look of the trees. Now, the last thing I picked up from Pegasus Hobbies was their last bottle of Woodland Scenics Hob E Tac glue. I know that sounds funny, but that’s how it’s spelled. HobETac glue. I’d seen a couple youtube videos on using it and I wanted to try it out out. This bottle cost me eight US dollars. And it’s pretty wonderful. 

The instructions say paint it onto a surface and then wait until it goes clear, which in my environment took about an hour. I think in more humid environments it’s gonna take longer, but even when it’s still white but has had some time to evaporate some of it’s moisture, it’s still very tacky. I was able to just glob on foam flock and sea foam and whatever, it grabbed that stuff super well. It seems pretty durable too, but we’re gonna seal all this stuff later on anyway. 

After messing around with the normal tacky glue and making custom clumps and all that stuff, I wish I’d just had this Hob E Tac from the beginning. I am also fairly certain that this stuff is just some kind of industrial water-based contact cement and there’s probably a much cheaper industrial version of it out there. A quick google search brings up all kinds of products, especially for gluing leather together. So maybe one day I’ll splurge on some of these products and test ‘em out on more trees. I just like how easy it was working with this stuff. 

Some of you are probably shouting at me to use spray adhesive, like spray 77 or something similar. You probably have a valid point. But for me there were two reasons I couldn’t use a spray adhesive. One, I can’t spray stuff like that in my apartment, the fumes are terrible and it gets everywhere. I know from experience. But the other reason is that I would have had to mask off all of the trunks and portions of the branches where I didn’t want flock. So I recommend this Hob E Tac, it isn’t too smelly, it didn’t make me sick to use it in the apartment and when it’s ready to stick stuff too, stuff sticks right to it.

I even just started putting the Hob E Tac onto the already glued flock to add more flock on top and that worked great as well. This is how we learn what we don’t know. We do something new and see what works.

Finally I have all the tree armatures flocked. And now it’s time for a genuine mess. I mixed up my own version of scenic cement for my little cheapy spray bottles with some PVA glue, some modpodge and I meant to add some Mecha Matte Varnish but I forgot and obviously a lot of water. And I doused all the trees in this stuff, just hosed ‘em down as best as I could. Next time I’m gonna use a full size spray bottle with real spraying power. I also put down two pieces of black construction paper to keep the mess contained on the hobby desk. And after spraying down each tree I got out some of this alternative leafy flock I already had from Noch and sprinkled this on top of all the green trees and this was an excellent finishing touch. I mean, you know, most youtube videos about making trees tell you to do something like this and that’s for a reason. But yeah once these things all dried, I think they ended up exactly where I thought I would get ‘em, fairly rugged sealed scatter terrain trees.

For the next step, I decided to order some sculptamold. I’ve never used this brand before but I’ve worked with similar products and it’s just a cheaper bulk alternative to the terrain pastes I have currently on hand. I know you can make your own with toilet paper and plaster of paris and I know you can use like the grout and spackle and sand to do a similar type of thing but you know I was placing an Amazon order for other stuff and just threw this into the shopping cart because I tried to find any store near me where I could just pick it up off the shelf and I couldn’t find a single place with it in stock in a 35 mile radius. Whatever, I got it and we’re putting it down to cover all the seams and where the foam hits the bases and on these small pine trees I just covered their foam bits all the way up. I put some of it on the cork surfaces to add texture and break up any flat areas. This stuff kicks pretty fast but I ended up having to leave it overnight to like finish drying all the way.

When I went to Michael’s looking for sculptamold I decided to refresh my terrain paints and found this line of matte colors from Folk Art and so I got a few of the standard colors I like to have on hand for cheap terrain painting. I put some brown and black into some modpodge and then I forgot to not add water for this step and ended up thinning down the first batch of modpodge which is not what you wanna do for this type of sealing. So I eventually had to drop a second coat of modpodge on top of the first later on. But yeah, sealing all the foam and plaster in modpodge is pretty standard and it goes pretty fast. Then I left that to dry for a few hours.

And now we’re onto dry brushing the rocks. Using my trusty cheap makeup brushes and more of the Folk Art paint, I built up from a pretty heavy first coat of gray to lighter and lighter colors. I introduced some brown just to add some color variation to the stone. I used pure white at the very end to just hit the edges of the rocks, and all this knowing the wash stage is coming next.

I have these two old bottles of Lester Bursley wash that I made like five years ago and haven’t hardly used – because I made it to use on terrain so you can see that obviously I haven’t build a lot of terrain between now and then. But now I finally got terrain to use it on. So I’ve got a black sorta nuln oil clone and an agrax-seraphim sepia facsimile and I also mixed up a bit of this green and brown matte paint and water with a couple drops of 182 proof rubbing alcohol to make quickie Athonian camoushade replacement. It’s not the real way to do this, I should have used inks but this is speed crafting, c’mon! I got no time to do stuff right!

While dumping these washes all over, I tried to mix them up in different spots all over the rocks to create color variation and visual texture. Again, this is the speed crafting method and not a “I’m gonna make the most realistic miniature rock formations in the world and they’re gonna look awesome” method. 

Now finally to flock – we’re in the home stretch! To start with, I mixed up a couple different color tones of flock with all these various flocking products that I have. I put some static grass in the mix and some old tea leaves and I set up a vibrant emerald green mix, and a more realistic dull dark green mix and a brighter, yellowish mix. 

And then, I realize the home stretch is not as home stretchy as I thought. I forgot to do something I should have done before the painting stage. I get some of this Wet Ground terrain paste and add a healthy dose of coarse and smooth sand to it, cause this paste is intended to look like wet mud so it’s only lightly textured and I want something more textured, but I didn’t wanna go buy another jar of the same stuff that just has more sand in it. So I just add my own. It’s kinda like instead of buying 17 shades of gray, you just use bottles of black and white to mix up whatever shade you want when you want. I slap this stuff on small sections of the terrain pieces to create little patches of micro texture and to cover some of the more egregious seams in the foam. You can do this same thing with sand and baking soda and PVA or wood glue, I just went with this kinda expensive jar of terrain product because I know it’ll dry fast. And I’m planning to put flock down wherever I put this stuff down. I don’t know why I’m doing this, it’s actually totally unnecessary, flock would cover everything just fine but it would have been worth the time if I’d done it before the paint went down because then it would have become part of the overall terrain texture and we’d have had this texture to peek through the flock in places randomly. As it is, because I’m putting it down on top of the paint, I kinda have to cover it with flock if I’m not gonna take the time to like paint al the patches individually.

Now, a few days prior I had made a few more of these PVA glue soaked clump foliage bush things on wax paper, but as you can see, my overzealousness with the glue left this border of glue film around the bottom edge of the clusters. But that’s not a problem, we’re gonna blend these edges into the bases with flock and some of that terrain paste. I had these two extra Sintra bases that I had planned to make rough terrain out of, and I figure putting these bushes down will work just fine for that purpose. They’ll offer some, you know, partial cover, a miniature can move across it with the rough terrain penalty, et cetera. Some hot glue to fasten theses bushes down and we’re good to go. Adding one or two to the bases of trees is kinda cool too. Wait a minute, I’m supposed to be speed crafting, not messing around with actually thinking about extra details, let’s get a move on!

So these two bases of shrubbery get fully covered in the terrain paste and we’ll add a little dry brushing after it dries and some random flock with the time comes. 

Which is now, the Abby Singer step! The Abby Singer is the second to last shot of a shooting day on a film set. The last shot is called the martini shot. Which I’m sure you can infer why. Anyway, time for flocking these stupid things that I’m very sick of looking at. I add a little bit of black and umber ink to the PVA glue and a splash of water, but that’s kinda unnecessary too. This flocking process took a decent amount of time, relatively speaking. But it’s the step that makes the whole process look like something, finally, that I might be okay with having on the table. Having grown up in the desert, I have a strange yearning and love for all things forest-y and mossy. And rocks covered in greenery, however fake they may be, just makes me feel good to look at. I just really enjoy flocking greenery over chunks of stone, it just looks … pretty to me. 

And now the martini shot! I got a big boy spray bottle this time and put my pre-mixed scenic cement in there and it was truly overkill. I hosed these things down like I had cement to spare. Which I did not, but man, using this spray bottle versus the little perfume sprayer thing, it was a bit much. I easily wasted 50% of the cement on the background paper I put down to protect my tabletop, which I basically soaked through in about 2 seconds. There’s something to be said about having a garage or a basement or some kind of workshop area that isn’t your apartment for this kind of mess. Someday, right? Gotta have dreams.

So in the end, I recorded about five and half hours of footage. And I was being pretty conservative with hitting that record button, having learned my lesson from previous videos. So my guess is I probably put about 15 hours into this batch of scenery. And yet I was going at it with a speed crafting mindset. I didn’t do anything spectacular with the carving of the rocks or really anything too creative. I was honestly just trying to go fast and ride that line of acceptability. But the trees took me a long time to do and yeah I think it’s just manual labor, just all the grunt work, the grind so to speak. 

And I had to fight Rowan Witchbane every step of the way to keep my terrain from being ripped apart by her gleeful claws and mischievous mischief making. She’s a tiny Tasmanian Devil. To all things hobby-related. 

Next time around I think I can do the trees much faster because I’ve worked out all the kinks, I know more about what I’m doing. In fact, I bought another bag of tree armatures when I was at Brookhurst Hobbies the other day, just because I have all that sea foam left and a couple of colors of that foliage cluster product and the most important thing, to me, that bottle of Hob E Tac. So making more trees in the future won’t be such a pain the ass. Carving up stone from foam, well, that’s always just gonna be tedious. But next time I do a batch of terrain, I want to take the stone formations a little more serious and put some thought into the design and making some cooler more natural-looking shapes and textures. 

But hey, that’s a batch of rocks and trees done! I’m so glad this is over. Admittedly, this whole process happening to occur with that sudden influx of day job work really cramped my schedule, so it was, you know, kinda tough to get through. And now that I’m looking at all of it together, it’s kinda weird … it kinda doesn’t look like enough terrain. Well, it’s gonna have to be enough to play that Silver Bayonet scenario. 

So, go speed craft a table full of scatter terrain, and enjoy that martini shot when you get to the end.

See ya!

Two Books Hollywood Should Adapt (And You Might Wanna Read)!

by
Transcript

The hard-edged captain of a mercenary army is betrayed by her employer, a powerful duke. Recruiting a ragtag group of killers and miscreants, she goes on a revenge spree of murder and mayhem, waging a personal war against the aristocracy and wreaking havoc upon herself and those she’s hired. Think Kill Bill meets Game Of Thrones directed by early Guy Ritchie. 

A twelve year old orphan boy in 12th century Korea dreams of becoming a potter but the caste system he lives in precludes him from even learning the trade, much less having a shot at becoming a real artist. However, through clever thinking and honest ambition, young Tree-Ear works his way into an apprenticeship while learning the value of community, self-discipline, family and the true value art holds for humanity. 

Those two logline sorta things are for two books I’ve tried to option in the past. I think the first would make a freakin fantastic TV mini-series and the latter a wonderful movie for kids and their parents. Let’s adjourn to the library and talk book recommendations.

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we talk about books Hollywood needs to adapt. And we thank our patrons for their glorious patronization. 

So, we’ve all got favorite books we think would be great to see on the big screen. I guess “big screen” is an outdated colloquialism since most of us watch stuff in our living rooms or maybe, God forbid, on our tablets. 

And if you tell me you watch movies on your phone, you’re fired.

I jest, I jest. 

Today I wanna share a couple of my favorite books that I think would make such great cinematic adaptations that I’ve actually tried to option them. One of them is a rated-R, HBO-style, gritty, dark and violent fantasy action thriller and one is a PG-rated, family-friendly children’s story with one of the best themes I’ve ever come across.

First, what’s an option? The path of a book or comic book or other published material, fan fiction, et cetera, to becoming a movie or tv show starts with an option. An option is basically leasing, for a limited time, the right to buy the production or filming rights to an IP. New York Times best sellers are almost always automatically optioned prior to their release dates. Movie studios get sent galleys which they can read early and buy an option on. A galley is like a proof copy of a book before it goes into mass printing. So a person or company that has purchased an option has whatever the time frame is that’s stated in the option contract to decide if they want to actually buy the full rights to the IP. And during the time that they hold the option, no one else can buy the filming rights so they’re essentially buying a window of non-compete time in which to make a decision. If they decide they wanna make the movie, for example, then they have to purchase the full production rights to the book, or IP or whatever. Even that contract will probably have a time limit but it’s typically a multi-year window at the very least, where an option typically lasts six to twelve months. When an option on a book lapses, another party can try to buy that option, or the original purchaser can negotiate paying for an extension. 

There’s probably a lot more intricate law to all this but that’s the basics. And none of this really has anything to do with anything here, this is basically just a book recommendation video. But I was granted a six month option on Linda Sue Park’s novel A Single Shard around 20 years ago. I wanted to adapt the book into a screenplay but I squandered that opportunity because … well, because I was still me 20 years ago. Lazy and addicted to video games. I’m a work in progress, remember? 

So many things to not be proud of in a person’s life, it’s a wonder we get anything done at all floating around in this psychic morass of self-loathing, huh? 

That uh … is that just me? Might just be me. Sorry. Moving on.

A Single Shard. That’s the cover right there. It’s a wonderful book, a truly great story. It would seriously make a great flick, whether live action or animated. CG or anime style, even. And that’s the main attribute shared by both these books, in my opinion they would adapt to visual storytelling really well. Not every story is universally adaptable that way.

So, A Single Shard is about Tree-Ear, a boy who’s grown up an orphan and lives under a bridge with a crippled elderly guy named Crane-man. The story takes place during the 1100s in Korea, so there’s this definite medieval caste system in the society and just getting enough food to survive on a daily basis is the main goal for our young protagonist, who is smart and who’s been mostly raised by the kind-hearted Crane-man. 

So you’ve got this orphan kid who steals food and other useful items from the village trash pits and one unique aspect to this village is that many of the residents are potters. Located near a clay quarry, these master clay sculptors and artisans work with the celadon glazing technique. Now this is all historically accurate. 

So Tree-Ear not only wants to survive but he’s very impressed with work of the gruff old artisan Min. The kid accidentally breaks one of Min’s works of art but in a show of strong moral character – and clever survival instincts – Tree-Ear basically demands to work off his debt. For no pay of course. But he does know that custom will require Min to at least provide lunch each day, half of which Tree-Ear shares with Crane-man under the bridge. And Tree-Ear dreams of learning how to sculpt clay and become an artisan himself, despite knowing that the social structures basically deny orphans any sort of path to apprenticeship.

The author has done such a cool job of incorporating concepts of honesty, honor, morals and being part of a community in her book. There’s even a whole bit that alludes to the morals regarding intellectual property and insider trading. It might be a little oblique, but to me, it’s right there. 

But the overall theme that I love about this story, and it’s not one that I see a lot of comments on, is the theme regarding the question: is art a valuable part of society? I’ve always felt that art is equal to any other facet of life. I mean, if you had to live a live bereft of any kind of art … what would be the point of surviving each day?

And A Single Shard illustrates this theme poignantly without like spelling it out in exposition. So you’ve got that in addition to all the other hallmarks of classic, great coming of age stories – themes of personal responsibility, self-discipline, the nature of friendship and family – and of course it’s got interpersonal drama, adventure, high stakes, meaningful human decision-making and choices, and it’s all beautifully and simply written in a 150 page Newberry award-winning young adult slash children’s novel that you could read yourself in a day or two or read it over several nights of bedtime story sessions with your kiddos.

Ms. Park’s writing is very clear and straight forward but still evocative. She writes character traits and personality really well with an economy of words. And don’t let marketing execs get in your head, some of my favorite books are written “for young adults or children”. But my next recommendation, it ain’t for kids.

Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie is a gritty, dark low fantasy revenge story that’s as brutal, eclectic and melodramatic as it’s characters. And I’m using melodramatic in the best way, not as a slight. Again, I’m not getting into any spoilers, just a general overview. A lot of you might have already read this book or at least something by Mr. Abercrombie. If you have, let me know which one of his books is your favorite. This guy is a fantastic writer, he’s got a particular style and really he’s probably best known for his characterizations. I think booktubers classify him as “grim dark” fantasy, and that’s probably appropriate but his stuff isn’t really like, say, the whole Games Workshop Black Library stuff. I think his stories and characters are kinda like a cross between Tarantino and George RR Martin.

All of his books take place in the same world and he typically writes in trilogies. But he’s got a handful of stand-alone books, and even though characters definitely cross-populate all the books, the stand alone novels are indeed able to be read on their own. 

I thoroughly enjoy and recommend all of his stuff but my favorite is this gem right here. It’s an ensemble story, so it’s like a small team or group is the main protagonist, it’s definitely got the flavor of “the heist movie” sort of thing, and heists are one of my favorite sub-genres. 

You’ve got Monza Murcatto, the betrayed and left-for-dead mercenary captain. She’s stitched back together – ACK! No Spoilers! Ok. She’s a stubborn, intelligent, notorious tactician who suffers massive physical and emotional damage within the first few pages, and she vows revenge on every person in the room where she was betrayed.  

She recruits a team of disparate killers, including the reluctant barbarian warrior Caul Shivers, who’s got a voice like grinding rocks; the effete poisoner Morveer and his cheerful little blonde sociopath assistant Day; the drunken and depraved con man Nicomo Costa; the ex-inquisitor Practical Shylo Vitari; and the decidedly unfriendly Friendly, an autistic mathematical genius who’s built like a tank and prefers cleavers to swords.

Together, they go down Murcatto’s list, leaving a trail of corpses and mayhem far beyond what they ever intend. And of course the stakes rise with each successive target, no one gets through this tale unscathed and every character is more interesting than the last. 

Oh, let’s not forget Cas Shenkt. Upon eventually learning he’s being hunted, the Duke unleashes his own hunter on the party’s trail. And Shenkt is one of the coolest and most formidable assassins I’ve ever read about. And he represents what might be the only bit of magic we see in this particular book … and oh, what a fucked up bit of magic it is too. 

Gah, there’s so many scenes and character details I wanna blather about but this no spoiler limiter is just a pain in the ass. For those of you who’ve read this book, let’s see if I can use a bit of code to tell you what my absolute favorite scene is in the book, which made me laugh and laugh like a demented child. I mean, that’s what some art and entertainment is for, right, exercising those decidedly unsavory parts of our shadow selves, right? Right?! Yeah. Of course.

Anyway, here’s the code for the scene I couldn’t stop laughing at.

If you get it, you get it. For the rest of you, enjoy the discovery! 

As I mentioned, I’m a huge fan of the heist genre. Probably ever since I saw Disney’s Robin Hood when I was like six or something, and Best Served Cold is full of, well, they’re not heists, they’re assassination plots, but the heist formula and flavor is all there. The planning, the stress about what team member runs the highest risk of fouling things up, the nerve-wracking execution, the plans going wrong, all the good stuff that make heists super fun and interesting. At least to me. And it’s this inherent episodic nature of the plot that makes this book a prime candidate for a badass series adaptation, maybe a good 6 to 9 episodes of finite, granted very big budget, visual storytelling.

So, if you’re looking for something new to read, those are two recommendations. I’ve got plenty more of course and I’m sure you do too, but you know, one video at a time.

So, go read something. And lemme know what your favorite book is, my queue needs to grow.

See ya!

What Do You Do With A Can Of Smoke And Miniatures?

by
Transcript

Oh boy, I don’t know what we’re doing today, this came out of left field. Like most random ideas. And, full disclosure, I’m writing this part of the script right after pulling cards outta cameras, I ain’t even looked at the footage or photos yet. And I just poured a glass of peanut butter stout – thank you, patrons – and I got music blaring in my headphones and I’m just trying to hope I’ve got something interesting for ya today. Which in my current reality is an ever-present question. 

And this is undoubtedly strange already, ‘cause I’m describing where I was … four weeks ago? But when I was writing this, it was now. I mean, back then. This isn’t how this is supposed to work, but sometimes … yeah, sometimes, hey, sometimes we just gotta roll with it.

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes … the schedule just gets weird and your host just does something on a whim.

And we thank our patrons for blindly supporting those whims.

So today was supposed to be a skirmish game related topic, and just so you know, I kinda sorta had a plan. I wanted to do a, like, here’s how I photograph my minis sorta thing. I thought I might take pics of a warband, you know, but then a couple of things happened. 

One, I realized I don’t really have a cohesive warband … yet, that’s coming soon. And two, I had to shoot a particular shot for the Mystfin Isle trailer. And I thought, oh, maybe some of you dear viewers might like to see how I go about shooting something like that. Which really isn’t a big deal, it’s basically recreating the shot from the Tabletop Alchemy intro. But I got this new stuff to play with – aerosol atmosphere. So, everything just sorta turned into whatever the hell this is gonna be edited into.

So we’re gonna talk some camera stuff today, some lighting, some smoke and mirrors and there is a point to all this, a moral so to speak, but that comes at the end. Don’t get greedy, enjoy the ride. ‘Cause, you know, the ride is all we got.

Oh, and also, I guess, uh, welcome to my apartment. Slash makeshift studio. Imagine I’ve offered you a beer. And a place to sit. Somewhere. Maybe under the hobby desk over there.

All right, so I’m setting up a manual slider on which we’re gonna put a Sony a7iii with a Tamron 1 to 1 scale 90mm macro lens. Oh, here’s a Rowan Witchbane cameo for ya, all right, then I’m putting up down some light stands and a c-stand. Now I’ve got this little Amaran 60 D, we’re gonna use that for the backlight – I’ll put some links to all this stuff in the description in case you wanna check ‘em out. So then I’ve got a Nanlite something or other for our fill or key light and we’re gonna throw a soft box on it to, you know, soften the light. 

I’m gonna build the set on my trusty 3×3 skirmish table and I’ll put down my standard forest-y print gaming mat. I have yet to build any kind of physical terrain board, I typically use gaming mats just, you know, because they’re easy to use at this point. I’ll drag out every bit of jungle/tropical scatter terrain I’ve got and I arrange it after hooking the camera up to the LCD monitor on the painting desk. Being able to pipe the camera image out to a monitor makes dressing a shot to the camera frame way easier. 

And here’s my super advanced, patent-pending, technical dice rolling rig, which will, you know, help get our die right where we want it through careful measurement of angles and physics calculations and other, you know, secret proprietary sauce. And then we’ve got the main ingredient for this whole shebang, the can of smoke. 

Now all I need is an extra pair of hands, which, you know, I can probably order that on Amazon.

When I did the channel trailer shot, I was using a small fog machine and I was doing a push with the camera, so I was able to gun the smoke, push the camera, roll the dice all at the same time. And yes, I did like 90 takes of that shot, and no, that’s not an exaggeration. Hey, sometimes you just go until the magic happens.

But this time I wanted to do a lateral dolly move on the slider and I needed two hands just to operate the camera. The die roll and the spray can operating required another pair of hands. And sometimes magic happens in the form of a friend. My buddy Shadow came over just to help me out for twenty minutes. And for beer. Fair’s fair.

And, of course, sometimes, completely after the fact, you realize you did everything … wrong. But we’re in the business of salvaging – at least that’s that business I feel I’m in most of the time, I salvage what I can and try to remember not to do it wrong the next time. This’ll make sense in a moment.

So, I realize the subject of photography is it’s own entire iceberg of a thing and we’re in the weeds here without any sorta plan or map or you know, forethought. I’ll just point out a couple things I did right and a couple I did wrong and maybe there’s something in here that you can use or maybe it’ll inspire you to check out more in-depth photography stuff, I don’t know.

One thing I wanna touch on is the “gear factor”. Obviously here I’m using video production lights that I have on hand and I’m using a mirrorless camera with a specialty lens, but the lighting concepts should apply independent of gear. There might be some technical limitations here and there but you could do the same kind of lighting setup with household bulbs. And you can shoot with any kind of camera, cell phone, et cetera. There’s basically only one specific effect that you may not be able to get with a cell phone but I’ll point that out when we get to it.

So we start with the backlight. Ridley Scott once said that when in doubt, stick a bright light in the background and shine it into camera. The one quality you want for your backlight is “hard light”, so in most cases you don’t want to put diffusion on the backlight or use a soft light for the backlight. But see, even that’s not necessarily true. You may very well want a softer light for the backlight. It all depends on what you’re going for. What I’m going for here is a hard edge that will kinda represent sunlight and will make the silhouettes of everything hit by the backlight pop and become more defined from the background. But really, it’s main purpose here is to backlight the smoke. You’ll soon see as the smoke boils up into the foreground that our fill light just starts bouncing off the smoke and obscuring everything behind it. Smoke and rain are two cinematic elements that are almost always shot with backlight.

Now we need the fill light to expose everything we can’t see on this side of the backlight. If you were shooting outdoors or using the sun as your actual light source, it’s so powerful that it’s light will bounce all over the place and do a lot of the filling for you. But our little light here isn’t gonna do that. So we bring in this big ol soft box, cause I want to fill in the shadows and expose everything properly. Now, it’s all about balancing the exposures of the fill and the backlight. And like everything else, you can just adjust this to your liking.

One of the most important things of course is arranging what you’re actually shooting. Since I’m moving the camera for the shot, I want some foreground elements that just peek into the frame because they will move in parallax with background, giving us this sense of layers within the frame. If we didn’t have these foreground bits, the camera move would be much less noticeable and kinda irrelevant. This is where using a cell phone might not give you the prettiest look and that’s because of how the size of a camera sensor affects the depth of field. The smaller the sensor the larger the depth of field. Meaning, more stuff is in focus. I can kind of demonstrate this along with how your f-stop also affects the depth of field. So here in this single shot, if you pay attention to the skull rock in the background, you can see that at a stop of F 9 the skull rock is much sharper than at an F 2.8. Now, getting into what an F-stop is and aperture and all that stuff, I mean, if you’re curious about that we could do another video where I kinda go in-depth on photography stuff, but again I think you can find all that stuff out you know elsewhere on YouTube but I should have taken a shot with a cellphone to show you that too but with a cell phone, almost everything in this frame would be in focus.

Now sometimes that’s a bonus when shooting miniatures. With full frame sensors it can be a real struggle to get the depth of field large enough to even keep a single miniature in focus. Such as here in the slider shot. You can see the depth of field is really shallow, and I’m shooting at an F 9 which is typically what I try to shoot miniatures at just to keep a single miniature’s detail in focus. But at the same time, the foreground elements are nicely soft and that’s exactly what I’m looking for with this type of shot.

Now let’s talk about the canned smoke and the major mistake I made. As I mentioned, I’d had this idea about doing a little video on photographing a warband with atmosphere. And I kept thinking of this one shot I wanted to try to get – and we’re gonna look some still photos in a bit where I try to do just that. I wanted to get the smoke kinda boiling up around the miniature, in a still shot. So that idea was in my head and I didn’t adjust my thoughts when doing this moving shot for the adventure trailer. So I asked Shadow to roll the dice and gun the smoke at the same time, which was the wrong thing to do. So every take we did has a lot of movement going on with the smoke. But what I really wanted with this moving shot was the smoke drifting in curls and waves across the space, which means I should have asked Shadow to gun the smoke, wait for a few seconds and then do the camera move and the die roll. But I didn’t do that. Instead I’ve got twenty seven takes like this. 

Now, there’s definitely a few shots that’ll work and actually one or two that kinda did what I wantededed to do, wantedededed? wanted to do accidentally. But I did do an hour or so of kicking myself after the fact, you know, as you do. Or at least as I do. I mean, could I rebuild the set, put the lights back up, ask Shadow to come back for another beer? Sure. Did I do that? No. That’s why Ridley Scott is working on huge studio pictures and I’m working in an apartment. If the shot was 100% garbage, I would have redone it, but it’s just okay enough for me to be lazy about it.

And as for this can of smoke, it’s kind of expensive even though it is convenient, but you can do the same kinda thing with a cheap fog machine from the Halloween store. Which is again what I used for the channel trailer shot. Another thing you’ll notice is that the smoke rises and turns into haze pretty quick, which is typical of most water-based fog machines, disco foggers, what have you, but this aerosol can stuff dissipates way quicker than the fog from a fog machine. If you want that cool, low-lying fog effect where the fog sits on the ground like a heavy mist or something, that requires a temperature shift. So you can get that effect with dry ice in water or using an expensive fog machine that chills the smoke as it vapes out. Those are kinda used in like stage productions and stuff.

But all that said, having a little can to wave around and spray smoke out of is just kinda fun to mess with. Now we gotta wait for the smoke to clear.

So, like I said, we did a bunch of takes, just looking for a combination of good camera move, good dice roll and good smoke to hit all at once. I even kinda like this random shot of Shadow’s hand picking up the die, I should have done an actual shot specifically to capture that type of action. But, you know, that’s part of post production, noticing all the stuff you coulda-woulda-shoulda done.

Now after we’d wrapped this shot and Shadow took off, I still wanted to mess around with the aerosol atmosphere and do some still photographs. So I grabbed my award-winning troll kin shaman and posted him up in the scene and adjusted the background terrain elements and tried to figure out how to actually capture some photos on my own. 

Also, jingle jangle! In case you don’t believe me, that’s it’s an award-winning miniature. Jingle jangle.

So this camera has a timer setting, like most cameras, but what was really handy is that it has a secondary timer function where it’ll snap 3, 5 or 10 frames when it triggers instead of one. So I used this setting at the beginning but it became pretty clear pretty quick that me watching the little timer light flash and knowing when to hit the smoke was tricky at best. Eventually I figured out that I had to put the camera in high speed shooting mode, which means it would just literally take pictures as long as I held the shutter button down, and hit the smoke at the same time. That meant I had to sort of stretch one arm out to the camera and my other arm was stretched out to the other side with the can of smoke and of course I should have had some video of me doing that but for some late-night reason, I just didn’t have the second camera rolling. I need an AI assistant that doesn’t suck to help me out with remembering the too many things I need to remember. 

So I got a ton of shots with the smoke. I played with different shutter speeds and at first I was at like a quarter of a second but that blurs the smoke too much and makes it kind of really featureless and just more like an ambient haze. I wanted to sorta freeze some of the shape of the smoke, so to do that I ramped the shutter speed up to one 640th of a second to try to freeze the movement a little bit more. That meant I had to compensate exposure wise by pumping the ISO (which is basically gain, just digitally making the image brighter – that’s a very rudimentary summary of ISO), but the higher the ISO the more noise you introduce into the image, typically. But hey, we’re just having fun at this point, we’re just messing around, so we’re not gonna worry about it, we’re just doing tests.  

Anyway, when I was shooting these frames here, I was gunning the smoke at a downward angle from up high and at the time I didn’t think I liked it, but seeing this column of smoke here in Lightroom now, it’s kinda interesting! It’s just kinda cool because it’s weird, it almost looks like a ray of light or something, or some kind special effect. I mean magical effect, ‘cause I guess it is a special effect. 

Another thing I want to do in the future is play around with putting a monitor in the background so where all this dark background is could be like whatever image we want to put on the screen. I could put a stormy sky on the screen or a jungle background or something, it’s definitely something I want to try out. And as you can see I took a lot of shots. It was just fun to keep gunning the smoke and seeing what happened.

But at some point I kinda wanted the smoke to come up from behind the miniature instead of dropping down from the sky, so I repositioned the miniature on a chunk of terrain to get him up off the table surface and here’s another issue with shooting stuff yourself, you can’t see when you and your can of smoke is right in frame. You have to shoot a pic, then go take a look, go, ah, dammit, then take another guess as to where to put your hand and try again. 

And finally I started to get what I was initially going for, which is the smoke boiling up behind but not filling the space in front of the figure. You can see how my starting the camera before hitting the smoke button allowed me to capture this bit and that’s what I couldn’t quite manage with the timer thing. And then just on a whim I put a piece green gel on the back light to see what that would do to the highlight color and the smoke itself. The green smoke is pretty trippy. But this shot here, right before the smoke swallows the mini, the green is too much but it is kinda cool, like you can see the green backlight on the figure and it kinda ties the mini into the scene more. 

But yeah, once you have all these random shots that you have no idea if they’re working or not, you get to go through ‘em in some kind of photo app. And I’ll just be looking at the different smoke shapes and textures and how the smoke looks when it wraps around the figure and the cool thing is just how the organic nature of the whole process creates different results in every frame. 

And of course photos can be color corrected and all kinds of things. Like here I just crushed the background to make the mini pop a bit more but then that kinda gets rid of the smoke effect. There’s literally an infinite number of tweaks and changes you can do while treating a photograph. But yeah, I like this pic and I like this one, I think there’s definitely a handful of interesting shots out of the 177 still images I captured.

So, the moral of this video is … sometimes you just gotta have fun and trip down the rabbit hole a little bit. Explore tangents, have fun with tests. Not everything has to align with a specific goal and more times than not, a goal might be born from the exploration itself. No matter what, any and all exploration results in experience points of some kind. And sometimes it’s just fun to do things for fun.

So, go do something on a whim. See where it takes you.

And report back with your findings.

See ya!

Railroading is 100% Necessary In Your D&D/TTRPG Adventure!

by
Transcript

Groggy, you come to your senses. Your head hurts like you had too much schnapps the night before. You’re lying on your back, staring up at a circle of torchlight high above, something dangling down from it. This chamber is full of shadows, but you smell lamp oil and smoke, noting two or three torches burning in the corners of what … looks like … a library?

There are other figures groaning awake near you. You hear the rustle and creak of old leather scraping on cracked stone. You notice a bit of movement, try to focus through the dull ache in your head as the last few feet of what might be a rope ladder snakes up into that circle of torchlight, which seems to actually be some kind hatch in the vaulted ceiling thirty feet above you. 

And looking around with a bit more clarity, it dawns on you that this chamber there appears to have no windows and no doors. What do these other figures stirring in the room see when they look at you. Describe yourself for the party.

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy where we’re doing our first Part 2! Yep, I told ya I had some further ideas at the end of episode 25 – jingle jangle. Nope. Just trying to workshop new trademark-able call outs, and that ain’t it. And yep, I’m calling these videos episodes. Does it make sense? Not at all. Does it make me feel like I’m a producer. 100%. It’s also just a handy file-naming structure for keeping stuff organized in the old Mac. But now I can also thank my patrons for supporting the show! That’s got a nice ring to it. Thank you very much.

Oh, and further and, let’s hear from today’s sponsor.

All right, I hope that wasn’t too cheesy. 

All right, enough shenanigans, let’s get to it.

Let’s talk about what can make a good first session adventure for players – or a DM – that are brand new to DnD. Really brand new to tabletop RPGs in general. We talked in episode 25 about removing every possible obstacle from a brand new player’s path to the table and now I want to suggest something way more controversial. 

Your first adventure for brand new players should be 100% railroaded!

All right, that’s a bit on the facetious side, but I think it’s mostly true. Technically what I want to say is “strategic railroading” is perfect for brand new players.

In the past I’ve started new players with an in medias res opening to the session and as you heard in the intro, wherever they start there ain’t no windows and there ain’t no doors – and consider this dismaying observation. 

If you’ve been to Disneyland or Disney World, I’m sure you’ve enjoyed the Autopia ride, right? Where you get to drive these cool little mini cars and a single track runs down the middle of the lane between the car’s wheels, so while you do actually get to steer the car, you don’t get to go road-raging across traffic. And you get to apply the gas and the brakes, you know, to an extent. This is the kind of railroading I’m talking about.

Another useful metaphor is the lab rat and the lab rat’s maze. 

When you design your map with these metaphors in mind, you’re basically designing a linear level as opposed to an open world level. I mean, open worlds don’t really have “levels” but you get what I mean. I design a pretty straightforward path, but of course include some areas where new players can “choose a direction”, places where they can make decisions, et cetera.

Here’s a map I made a while ago for just such an adventure, specifically for a group of players who’d never played DnD before, or any tabletop RPG for that matter. They start in chamber A and there’s only one way out of that room, these stairs that descend. That stairwell leads to a trap door that opens into a hallway, and so when the players arrive here, they have their first in-game decision moment – head south to check out this closed doorway at the end of the hall or head north to where they can see the corridor has a blind turn. For first time players, this is plenty for them to deal with. 

Side note, it’s pretty funny how I always spend so much time building maps in Photoshop or whatever that are typically only gonna be seen by … me. We’re gonna ignore what that might say about my narcissistic state and chalk it up to having fun being creative. Don’t judge me! 

The key to this first adventure is to not overwhelm the newbies with too many choices. Don’t take away their agency, just give ‘em some simple walls to play within. You don’t set the first graders loose in Disneyland all on their own, you set ‘em loose in the McDonald’s playhouse. 

Actually, never do that either, those things are gross.

Your players will have all kinds of fun making choices and fighting monsters and investigating small contained spaces with a very simple story for their first game. They’re gonna be learning game rules and character abilities and just getting to know what playing an RPG is like during this time. I think it’s important they’re given a clear goal and then have time to explore whatever aspects of DnD come up, from combat to exploration to role play. 

And an in-story or in-game time limit is probably a good thing to incorporate as well, something to give them a sense to urgency that drives them toward whatever that goal is. This is a pretty typical bit of DM advice from across the internet.

For this little adventure here, which I called Gravesgarde, the player characters wake up on the floor of an underground library. They’ve been shanghaied and thrown down here and a vaguely sinister bishop, talking to them from the ceiling trap door, informs them they’ve been “volunteered” by the city watch for this little quest. There’s an escaped convict hiding in the catacombs below that needs catching and the bishop would much prefer to have the convict returned alive with the macguffin they stole intact, but the macguffin is too important to let fall into anyone else’s hands, so if that convict cannot be caught, well, in four hours, he’s set to unleash a torrent of the cathedral’s holy witch-hunting spiders to clear out the whole place of anything living. And if the characters succeed in subduing and returning the convict, they’ll be granted a generous sack of gold along with their freedom. If not, good luck with the eight-legged freaks.

So the players have a goal: find and capture a runaway, and a time limit: four hours. I usually give a little description of these nightmare spiders, each as big as a wolf, sort of crowding around the bishop and the trap door with their spiky hairy legs and too many eyes, just to impart a bit of squeamishness about what failure is gonna look and feel like. Then the trap door slams shut and the players are on their own.

Down in the catacombs, which turn out to be the ruins of an ancient church that apparently the town’s cathedral has been built over the top of, I’ve placed a simple trap for the players to encounter and made sure there are some spots where they can make some decisions, like these doors here or here, et cetera. But as you can easily see, no matter where they end up going, they can only ever end up at the end of the maze. And they can’t go backwards. I mean they could, but they already know there are no windows and no doors behind them.

This map might look too small for a typical game night, and it almost certainly is for regular players, but for a group of total noobs, this is more than enough. And I would say that another thing to consider is the real-world time your session takes. A dnd session for brand new players that lasts only 2 or two and a half hours is way better than a session lasting five plus hours. I mean unless you can gauge they’re really into it. Because new players are contending with not only playing the game but also learning the game, their mental fatigue is likely to climb much faster than normal. And in my opinion the end goal of this first adventure has nothing to with the adventure itself, the end goal is to hopefully have these new players wanting to play again, simple as that. 

I only have like four combat encounters in this whole map, and those are only dealing with one or two adversaries at a time. There’s a dark mantle in here and a couple of skeletons in these little rooms and there’s the main convict they’re after, which they’ll encounter somewhere in this area. That convict turns out to be possessed by a demon, and the demon is what the bishop actually wants in the end. So the convict is basically the “big bad guy” of this little adventure. 

Putting your new players in a simple sorta lab-rat style maze like this gives you and them the time and freedom to learn the basics of DnD and have fun without being stressed by too much information or too many choices. Always remember that when you understand or are familiar with something, things you don’t even think about at all are all brand new and unknown to someone who’s new to that thing, and they’ll need some time to absorb the new concepts and all that stuff, even the most basic ones.

So, we all know the saying right? Keep it simple, stupid, that’s what I say to myself every day and every day, I fail in some way to do that. Keeping things simple can actually be more difficult than it sounds. It’s kinda like writing, shorter is better, but shorter is almost certainly more difficult.

So, go make a maze for new players and see if you can lure some new folks into it with a piece of expensive cheese. Or, you know, maybe some wine. And always have fun.

See ya! 

World Of Warcraft-Inspired Mini!

by
Transcript

I don’t have an appropriate clip for today’s painting subject, so I just grabbed one of my old highlights from back in the day of a game by the same company that’s inspiring today’s painting project. And I don’t have an appropriate clip because I kicked that addiction cold turkey twelve years ago, and that was back before I ever captured clips of anything. 

I’m a late adopter, what can I say.

I found this figure a couple years ago on Etsy and immediately knew how I wanted to paint it up. And that’s Warcraft style!

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we paint a mini just for fun and without any particular game in mind! And we thank out patrons, the wind beneath our bbq wings. Tabletop Alchemy, get your spray can cheese here. 

All right, how many of you dear viewers were addicted to – I mean “played” – World of Warcraft? I played the first two expansions and, here’s a little personal nostalgia, I first downloaded it thinking my oldest daughter would dig it, she was 11 or 12 at the time. And it was both of our’s first experience with an MMORPG. And when we started it up for the first time, we sat side by side at my desk and she chose the race – Night Elf – and I chose the class – Hunter. And while I will always argue with my buddy about the insipid nature of the term “member berries”, I’ll always have a fond memory of that now-defunct night elf starting zone Teldrassil.

That environment was so atmospheric and gorgeous to roam around in and the music and sounds were just fantastic. And for the first couple of days my daughter and I split the keyboard. One of us drove while one of us punched the combat buttons. It was silly, but it was fun and just an awesome father-daughter moment.

This troll warrior miniature is straight up World of Warcraft, there’s no doubt about it. And I have two specific things I’m looking forward to painting that I think will really sell the WoW factor – that’s World of Warcraft factor.

So this guy’s been sitting in primer for a year at least, hanging out in the Pile of Opportunity, Primed and Ready Edition display case, and he’s on one of those bases from Micro Art Studio. Right off the bat, I’m going for some classic WoW, blue troll skin tones. Now obviously trolls come in a variety of epidermal shades but I wanted to go with the classic blue both because it’s sorta classic and it’s gonna be a good contrast for the other colors I’ve got planned.

Red’s another pretty classic WoW color, at least for the Horde, right, but to keep the armor a little bit differentiated, I’m putting down a more rusty red on the pants here. I’ll use some of the brown I mixed into the pants color – trousers for you Brits – I use that brown for the base leather tone. 

And then I added a little bit of purple for the pants shading, again, to keep playing with variation in the red tones.

As always you gotta do some touch up when you’re gonna put down either transparent paints or lighter colors and I like this AK 3rd Gen Pale Gray for that. In fact, I’m liking this AK 3rd Gen paint line more and more as I use it more and more. 

This Shyish Purple contrast paint goes on almost black, so while I wanted to give some color to the boots, I didn’t want them to stand out too much, even though bright armor pieces are definitely a wow thing. You’re always looking all mismatched until you hit the higher levels in the game – transmog wasn’t a thing back when I played. Some wildwood contrast for the banner staff and then it’s on to highlighting the skin.

I’m pretty terrible at painting muscles and bare flesh, this is something I need to work on. For some reason, the fact that it’s not actual “skin tone” makes it a little easier but still. I put down a second highlight knowing that I’m going to wash this all down with a blue shade. I used drakenhof nightshade, but it is the old formula and it’s a pretty old bottle of paint. I’m not sure it worked the way it was supposed to, it seems to have introduced a lot of texture over the top of the highlights rather than smoothing them like I wanted. 

Oh, right, I forgot to the hit the banner headpiece with the red and I use more of that pale gray to pick out the raised detail in prep for the gold metallics.

Which we put on now, starting with this darker, dimmer gold from Scale 75, I typically use their metallics the most. And painting all these spikes and armor trim is definitely as much of a pain the ass as it looks like it is. And there’s quite a bit of gold going on with all these bracelets and the sword hilt and the banner thing. I used a slightly lighter gold to kind of hit the tops of all the spikes and introduce a tiny bit of highlighting. Not that it’s really noticeable.

I have no idea what this spikey ball thing is, it’s like a cross between an incense censor and some kind of fantasy bomb slash morning star thing. I think dark iron has the right feel and we’ll put some rust on it in a bit.

Some purple highlights for the boots, again, just to bring up some of that World of Warcraft flavor and I also have a color plan here, kind of. Little touches of a brighter purple to seal the deal, even though I still want the boots to be dark but just with a hint of that purple vibe.

Now for some typical leather highlighting, I kinda use this recipe for most leather accents, putting in a first highlight and then adding a second highlight that I try to put down with some scratches and stippling techniques for texture. 

Then some washes, Army painter soft tone for the leather and Citadel Sepia – the old formula – for all this crazy gold. I just cover the red armor in it too cause it would be a nightmare to try NOT to hit those reds. Washes are always my favorite part. 

While the wash is drying I hit the cloth straps on the banner staff – I’m sure they’re supposed to be leather but I wanted to get some brighter contrast in the colors there, so I decided they were some kind of canvas strips or whatever.

In the wash mood, I figured smudging down this pain censer with black contrast would be about right for the end look.

And then again while that dries, it’s back to the strips for some tiny highlights.

And now it’s time to highlight the edges of the gold and the armor trim and the sword hilt. This just took a long time, there’s so much of it everywhere. I typically hit finished miniatures with a matte coat, which always dulls down any metallics and I always have to go back after the matte coat to retouch those metallics. With all this gold, that’s gonna be a lotta work. I should have thought about that and finished and matte coated everything else before doing any of the gold. 

As we say in the industry: oh well.

To highlight the armor, I intentionally wanted to make it a brighter, more rich red than the pants. Trousers. With all the spikes and stuff, the red highlights are just kinda little dabs here and there, but I think it’s working. And I finish with my favorite red, popping little dots in the middle of all those little dabs. 

So here we go, how about a little rust to add insult to injury when you get hit with this thing? Ain’t that just like a troll, slinging tetanus around as a parting gift?

And now the answer to that purple boot question – a huge swath of purple for the banner. It took me a while to decide on the banner color, and I don’t know why but I think it’s gonna work with the two signature color features I’ve had planned from the start. As an afterthought I realized the banner panels are stitched together and maybe they should have some variation in color or texture. So I just quickly darkened one of them. 

And then purple contrast over the whole thing for shading which actually kinda desaturates the purple while it darkens it, and that is all right. 

In preparation for the coming contrast treatment, I added some white highlights to all the sharp edges of the jagged sword hoping they’ll do their job under the transparent paint. Also adding some of these white highlights for the same reason to the hair-do. The hair-do? To the hair.

There’s always another little detail to hit, so some quick picking of the stitches on the banner with that same canvas color.

And now, time for the first of my two initial ideas for this guy – a bright green sword! How WoW is that? This is a great contrast color too, in fact, I kinda like all the greens in the Contrast line. But weapons in the game are typically standout features and this green is pretty stand out-ish, right?

And the second initial idea – you knew that magenta hair was coming, c’mon! I mean, if you’ve played wow for five minutes, you probably knew it was coming. I think if you google WoW troll, this is all you’re gonna see.

Highlighting the hair I wanted to try to maintain the saturation of the brighter color, but that’s a tough deal when you start working with pinks or very light colors into a mix, because white in general has a tendency to desaturate stuff. While I was doing this I kept thinking that I probably need to pick up some fluorescent paints to try out.

I added some very subtle white highlights to the sword, just to pop the edges a bit more, but I tried to be really careful with this step, I didn’t want to have to try to retouch contrast paint, that’s always a problem because of the transparency. 

And for this dude’s eyes, I just darken them, they’re so small I’m not gonna sweat highlights or anything like that.

And then it’s time for the base! I just slap some dirty green and gray all over it, even some brick red but you don’t get to see that cause my camera card hit capacity and I didn’t realize it had stopped recording, so, you know, bask in the professionalism.

A bunch of dry brushing with neutral gray and pale gray to bring the detail back and then it’s time for the washes. Washes always make everything better, they gotta be the best crutch in the armory, right?

And there he is, the World of Warcraft inspired troll, with tufts applied! That pink hair and green sword were the two ideas I had from when I first saw the figure on Etsy. I’m not a huge fan of all the gold but I think it ended up working okay, especially from the Blizzard aesthetic. Now I didn’t do my standard finishing matte coat, and maybe I will at some point, and then of course I’ll have to go back in and retouch all the metallics, so for now, he’s going on Instagram as is.

Pretty fun mini to paint and it’s always nice to knock something out of the Primed and Ready display case. Put another check in the done department, right?

So, you know, go paint something fun, maybe even something not game-specific!

See ya!

An Apology, A Take Down And More Questions About AI!

by
Transcript

Well, I had another video already uploaded and set to release today but there’s been a last-minute change of plans. Most of you know I typically produce videos weeks in advance to maintain my schedule, but there’s a first time for everything, right? So this is my first spur-of-the-moment upload.

And, here’s another first for me. It’s the first time I’ve felt driven to make a response video, even though it’s kinda weird because it’s a response to one of my own videos. And it’s also inspired by a particular commenter on my earlier video, AND it’s in response to a reply I received from an email I sent to Joe McCollough regarding this previous video. Which is this one, right here. Frostgrave vs ChatGPT. 

And in yet another first time for me, this will be the first time I’m going to retract a video and pull it down. It’s currently still up, but I’ll be pulling it down 24 hours from the release of this video. I want you guys to be able to see the comment thread I pinned there if you’re curious. 

And I don’t consider any of this particular situation like “ooh controversial-ness for the sake of controversy”, I actually consider this a microcosm of the much larger, world-spanning sociological predicament artificial intelligence is putting us in. Us as in, humanity. 

All right, let’s pull the ripcord, we’re going into free fall, hope you packed a lunch. Or a beer. Oh, and a parachute.

Greetings good humans, and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we find ourselves right in the thick of social conundrums and existential crises. And we do what hopefully we do best – we talk things out and discuss and have conversations. And where sometimes, your host has to make an apology.

And we thank our patrons for their continued and much appreciated support.

All right, we’re talking AI again and this is a can of worms, no doubt about it. I don’t know how many finite answers we’re gonna get outta this video, but it’s certainly gonna result in a few discussion-worthy questions.

So, the setup. If you don’t know, I recently posted a video in which I used ChatGPT to help me generate new scenarios to use with the miniatures-agnostic skirmish game, Frostgrave, which is written by Joe McCullough. In that video, I discovered that ChatGPT had at least the Frostgrave 2nd Edition rulebook in its dataset. But I also copied and pasted four scenarios from that rulebook into ChatGPT’s interface, ostensibly to give it some basis for learning the scenario format in the hopes that it would format its own output as a playable scenario.

Okay. So ChatGPT did surprisingly well at generating playable scenarios. 

Now, for the hairy stuff and the reason we’re here. Rule of Carnage commented on the video asking if my copy/pasting of the scenarios into ChatGPT was a breach of Frostgrave’s copyright (or perhaps trademark, either/or). 

I’ll be honest and tell you that when they asked me that, I felt a little twinge, you know, just that tiniest little bit of Spidey-sense that something might be awry. In my own thought process.

I replied to their comment and we’ve had a fairly long discussion there, and I’ve pinned that comment thread on that video, so you can peruse it, at least for the next 24 hours. 

Now my intentions here are not to prove or disprove Rule of Carnage’s assumptions or beliefs, nor my own. I am just gonna discuss what my own thoughts were and are regarding some of the ideas in that comment thread and to pose some general questions that I don’t have answers for.

I also emailed Joe McCullough with a link to the Frostgrave video and asked him what his thoughts were on it and what I had done. And as Rule of Carnage pointed out, I 100% should have done that before I posted that video. Hey, what can I say? I’m a champ at making mistakes. 

Joe graciously responded with a thoughtful reply and a general wish that I had not posted the video. I have the utmost respect for Joe both as an author and game designer and I have respect for both Joe and Rule of Carnage as people – assuming I haven’t been interacting with AI constructs. 

Yes, that’s just a joke, but one that’s probably going to become a legitimate concern in the very near future.

Anyway, Joe was very kind to point out that he didn’t feel I was maliciously trying to infringe on his rights, which is absolutely true. But he also pointed out that even though ChatGPT has Frostgrave in its dataset, he has never given any permission for his work to be used in any large language model’s dataset. And that what I had done technically amounted to plagiarism or piracy.

Joe also, also pointed out that what I did is made a bit murkier because of his own inclusion in the Frostgrave rule book of encouragement to players to use his scenarios as inspiration and jumping off points to create their own scenarios for his game. But he definitely does not like the idea of piracy, which is essentially what both OpenAI did and what I did, even though I didn’t consider that before I did what I did. And for that, I am sorry. 

Now, I’m going to say some things that will sound like I’m defending myself, but I just want to share what my thought process was for discussion’s sake, with full understanding that my intentions do not absolve me of any wrong-doing.  

Rule of Carnage has yet another point of view on what I did. They posed the notion that my video was suggesting to potential customers or players of Frostgrave ways of using ChatGPT to replace, or circumvent the need to purchase, actual Frostgrave books.

Now, of course, that was definitely not my intention. But … as we discussed back and forth in the comment thread, I realized I must admit that there is the possibility that a viewer of that video might come away with that exact idea. But of course then I’m thinking there’s the whole question of, and this is a silly metaphor but you’ll get it, if a borax miner shows a colleague how to use dynamite to help them dig a mine faster and that colleague then uses that knowledge of dynamite to help themselves rob a bank, is the borax miner responsible for what his colleague did? 

Of course, again, that doesn’t absolve the borax miner from mining illegally to begin with.

My intention with my video was to simply explore the possibility of using an AI to help generate new game scenarios to play. That was my entire reason for not just making the video but for doing the actual ChatGPT exercise. I did not – and would never – tell anyone to use ChatGPT to get around purchasing any of the awesome books Joe has written. Or any other author’s books. Having been a filmmaker, I’ve never pirated a copy of a movie. I never used Napster to pirate music back in the day.

I do, however, use Spotify. We’ll come back to Spotify in a bit.

In fact, in making the Frostgrave vs ChatGPT video, I actually thought I might be contributing to the extended value of owning Frostgrave and all its associated companion books. It just never occurred to me to say things like that in the video, which is neither here nor there relative to what we’re actually talking about. I just figured anyone who would be generating Frostgrave scenarios would be doing so because they’d run out of content to play. Yes, naiveté might very well be my middle name. You don’t know.

But I also do now think that pasting Frostgrave scenarios into ChatGPT was wrong of me to do because of the copyright issue and the infringement it posed upon Joe’s rights as an IP creator and I’ve got Rule of Carnage to thank for spurring on that realization.

But now let’s talk about AI as a tool, because, whether unfortunately or not, I don’t think it’s going away. Does that affect all the ethical questions surrounding it? No, not at all. It just means it’s something we have to deal with, somehow.

So, I have a question and this is for everyone. This is just a theoretical question, but let’s see how it goes. If I had a copy of ChatGPT or some other discreet writing AI that lived on my personal computer and it was not enabled with internet access, would it be okay for me to copy and paste in the Frostgrave rules and scenarios I have purchased, to allow this personal AI to add that information to its dataset, and then utilize the AI to generate or inspire or help me create new scenarios for me to play? Either solo or with friends. And I never publish those scenarios in any way – is that an acceptable use of AI with Frostgrave?

To me, that seems 100% acceptable. And legal. But, you know, I’ve been wrong before, right? Sometimes I need outside opinions and different viewpoints to come to unconsidered or new conclusions for myself. But as of right now, I think that the situation I just described should be free of controversy. But I don’t know. 

Now let’s look at the case of Dungeons and Dragons. So many people are using ChatGPT to create all kinds of D&D-related content or material or whatever. But D&D has an open gaming license so I suppose that’s what makes D&D an acceptable IP for use with ChatGPT. And this segues into Spotify with the whole license thing.

The Napster-to-Spotify sort of timeline or series of events seems to me to be indicative of what’s going to happen with ChatGPT or Large Language Models and art AI’s in general. I think initially artists and writers are going to sue – I mean, artists are already bringing class-action lawsuits against art AI manufacturers – coders? – whatever, companies that create and commercialize art AI and writers are probably not far behind. 

And this is kinda what happened with Napster. Someone created an app that illegally stole commercial music and a metric shit-ton of people used it and then it was sued out of existence and years later, we have Spotify and YouTube Music and Apple Music. We have a music industry driven entirely by tiny license fees and streaming apps. Movies and shows on streaming services operate in much the same way. And I think large language models are going to end up doing the same thing. And ultimately for creators, that’s not super-great because the licensing fees are so miniscule. But on the flip side of that, everyone gets to enjoy everyone’s music for affordable prices, even though I know the musicians aren’t making a lot of money. I do definitely feel the artist/distributor profit ratio needs to be adjusted.

Here’s another weird question I have. Let’s say OpenAi, the makers of ChatGPT – which from a quick Google search appears to have scanned every single title available on Amazon – what if OpenAI purchased a copy of every book in existence. So they own a copy of every book and then they feed every book they own into their AI’s dataset. Now what? Is that legal for them to do? If it is, is it legal for them to then give the public access to that AI and its dataset? What if they expressly forbid their AI from simply outputting the entire contents of a book? Is using the AI legal at that point? This is why I feel like the Spotify-style licensing process will be the way things work for these large language models and copyrighted written material in the future. But, you know, who knows.

There’s just so many weird questions – like, every published book makes up only a fraction of all the other publicly available content that an AI can consume or incorporate. Do there need to be licensing fees for that other material? Should I have a button on each of my videos here on YouTube to opt in or opt out of being incorporated into an AI’s dataset? I don’t know. I mean, I post the videos knowing they’ll be public. 

It’s weird, cause in a way, artificial intelligence IS us. It’s the sum total of human output, aggregated and made accessible to all humans. Sort of. There’s just so many weird questions we need to deal with.

One overall idea I can’t seem to shake is the notion that AI tools are here, they’re going to keep getting better at what they do, and if someone chooses to NOT use AI in certain capacities, that someone is probably going to be left behind, they are not going to be able to compete with other folks who do use AI to augment their work. This is an independent thought of the main video topic, I’m just ruminating on AI in general. There are all kinds of metaphors for this of course, but my goofy one is if I’m a lumberjack and I’ve been using a hand axe to chop down trees for my business and my competitor starts cutting trees down with a chainsaw, well, I better get to Home Depot and pick up a chainsaw, right?

Now I know there’s a lotta folks out there who would rather AI didn’t exist at all. I can’t say I blame them. Personally, for me, I really like the idea of AI, insofar as being a tool that allows me to work and create not just faster but in more unique ways. And in ways that I am unable to do because I don’t have a certain skill set. I want AI to do all the menial tasks for me. I want to direct what AI does for me. It paints a picture and I tell it to tweak this over here, change that over there,, make that funnier, make that more dramatic, delete that paragraph. I want to create with just my thoughts alone, as weird as that sounds. That really just amounts to me applying my aesthetic sense of taste to a product or piece of content or work of art that I wanna share with the world. And that’s really where I see all this going. Something that frightens a lot of people about AI is that it equalizes the playing field of creativity in a certain way. You don’t have to know how to write like Stephen King or paint like Picasso to generate content of a similar quality. But I think those fears might be a little bit unfounded, because it’s still going to be the human operator’s aesthetic taste and artistic choices in directing the AIs in the creation of their content that will result in either the success or failure of that content, success meaning how many other people enjoy what that human operator has produced. 

These are all crazy notions probably, and almost certainly naive, and things will probably never be that simple. There are lots of ways AI is going be abused in our society. And maybe the people out there freaking out about how it’s going to end society will end up being right. I personally don’t really buy that, I think humans might use AI to end society but I’m not convinced AI itself is gonna do anything on it’s own. But I also have no idea. I don’t think anyone does. But these kinds of conversations are the only way for us humans to stumble our way through this. As Rule of Carnage has put it, we’re all figuring these things out, and that includes governments, lawmakers and experts as well as you and me. And I think making mistakes is endemic to the process of learning how to deal with something new. 

So let’s wrap this up. I think I made a mistake with the Frostgrave video and I apologize for that; I think using AI to generate Frostgrave scenarios could be totally fine if or when Frostgrave is ever licensed to an AI dataset; and I think going forward I’ll try to be much more conscious of decisions I make when using AI as a creative tool.

So … go apologize for making a mistake – sorry, I was trying to do the normal type of sign off there, doesn’t feel quite appropriate. 

I’ll be looking forward to reading any and all comments, you know I like discussion and conversation, it’s definitely one of the things that helps me grow and be inspired. I hope it does for you too.

See ya!

Mystfin Isle, a D&D5e Compatible RPG Adventure with Tips & Tricks for New DMs!

by

Mystfin Isle, a D&D5e compatible adventure!

Built for starting a new group of players and giving the DM plenty of spots to drop their own larger campaign hooks. The island is a “closed sandbox” so no railroading or much prep is needed. It has a “Tips & Tricks For New DMs” section. 

Available at DriveThruRPG!

Features: 

  • 100 pages of content providing 3 – 9 sessions of play time, no railroading necessary
  • tips and tricks for new Dungeon Masters
  • drag-n-drop location
  • 3 mini-dungeons
  • 4 biomes, including a vast underground cavern river system to explore
  • secrets and mysteries
  • 3 independent methods of escape
  • multiple NPCs with their own stories
  • external campaign hook drop zones
  • maps, magic items, monsters, random tables and printable player handouts
  • full color epub and pdf formats with interactive links for easy navigation

How To Trick New Folks Into Playing D&D!

by
Transcript

All right man, you ready to play some D&D?

Are you talking about Dungeons and Dragons?

Yeah! D&D! You said you wanted to try it, today’s the day.

Yeah, I was just tryin to be trendy man.

You got anything better to do?

Well, I was gonna go on a –

On another singles hiking trip when you hate hiking? That doesn’t count, man. C’mon, I got three other players lined up, one of them’s bringing pizza! You wanna be like a wizard throwing some fireballs or you wanna be a badass warrior like The Hound in Game of Thrones?

Well, I do like Lord of the Rings, so I guess it’d be cool to like cast magic spells or whatever.

Awesome! Okay, just fill this out and we’ll start rolling some dice. I sent you a link.

Yep, got it. Is this like a uh … what is this, a tax form?

What’s better than a full, 100% usable, perfectly tuned, perfectly organized, perfectly designed OEM product? Well, if you’re me, the answer is … half of one. 

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we ignore the inevitable onslaught of the digital age and discuss things as if time were standing still. We’re going analog!

So you’ve got a new player or you’ve cleverly duped a bunch of your friends who’ve never played ttrpgs into playing some DnD. Or, you know, you’ve kidnapped some folks and forced them to roll some dice at crossbow point. Hey, whatever floats your boat, ain’t nobody here harshing your vibe.

However you’ve reached this point, nothing changes the fact that onboarding new customers is typically the most difficult thing for most commercial endeavors. So what can we tabletop gamers learn from slick salesmen and women and the retail and commercial service industries? 

Maybe we can settle this right now. There’s a thing that we all know called opportunity cost.

One tip we can take from them is that our goal should be to make the process as smooth and speed bump-free as possible. And you do that by removing speed bumps. Duh.

Now if you just hand someone new to DnD or tabletop rpgs in general a stack of rule books, you’re probably just gonna freak them out. This is a situation that warrants the ol’ boiling a frog trick. You want them in the soup before they know they’re gonna be soup. I musta been drunk when I wrote this, I knew I was missing a bottle of Cynar. What? It’s got an artichoke on the bottle.

Basically, the less someone knows about what goes into making the soup, and the less they have to work to make the soup themselves, the less trouble they’re gonna have attending dinner.

Here’s what I’ve done in the past to introduce new players to the game as simply as possible. Via light conversation, I get a bead on what kinda character they might wanna play. I ask softball questions like:

“Do you like the idea of casting magic spells or stabbing guys with swords?”

“What character would you play if you were in the Lord of the Rings movies?”

“Do you like the idea of healing or protecting your fellow party members?”

“You wanna sneak through the shadows picking pockets or pop off with a bow like Robin Hood?”

I can’t believe I just said “pop off”. 

Essentially I just want to find out what base class they gravitate towards – fighter, wizard, cleric, thief – without even mentioning the word “class”, I don’t bring up any of that minutia with them at all. 

I will ask them if they’d like to be a human, a hobbit, an elf, or a dwarf and just sort of leave it at that, unless they ask further about other races. And that’s it. I just make sure we all agree on a day and time and I just let them be until then. Basically in their minds, I want them thinking they’re just coming to hangout for some beer and pretzels. 

The point here is to do everything you can to not overwhelm them with too much information. I wanna alleviate as much work or even choices as possible. At this stage anyway. Remember, I’m talking about getting people into the game that have no inkling as to what DnD is like. And all we want is to get these folks to the table, which is the actual battle we’re fighting. We gotta think like used car salesmen here, just remove every conceivable obstacle you can think of. Offer to provide those pretzels and beer. Or energy drinks, or dark chocolate, or whatever they like – I don’t know you’re friends, you know them, just make sure the bribes accurate. And make sure wherever you play has access to a bathroom. That sounds dumb, but it’s a consideration that sometimes just doesn’t get considered because it sounds dumb.

Now, you only need a couple things to run a game of DnD. We need dice and we need players at a table. And those players need characters. There is one other thing you need but we’ll talk about that later. At this point, I know what everyone is gonna play, even if they don’t. On the day of the game, I run a very quick, like 30 minute session zero to setup their characters. And I start with this.

It’s a very simple half page character sheet. I print these out two to a page, cut them into half sheets and hand one to each player along with a cheap mechanical pencil.

Now I know some of you are yelling at me that I should just be sending new players to DnDBeyond, and hey, you might be right. But in a few real world instances, I’ve found that even DnD Beyond is a bit much for someone completely new to tabletop games, or in particular rpgs. So this is just what I’ve done in the past and it seemed to work pretty well. I also kinda don’t want them distracted by using their phones or tablets. I’d much rather have everyone hanging out in the same real world space, if you know what I mean. At least for this first session.

Remember, first impressions are … I don’t know, there’s some kind of saying about first impressions right? First impressions are hard to change, maybe. If our new players don’t have a good time or stuff takes too long to get going or they get too confused, the chances of them wanting to play again start dropping. No pressure, right? 

At the table I walk everyone through filling out their sheets together, starting with their character’s name, race and class. Again, I just tell them to put down fighter or wizard or thief, et cetera. And then I give everyone three six-sided dice and we roll up stats. I just tell everyone to roll the dice six times and jot down the totals on a sticky note. Which, yes, I also give them. Sharing is caring. When they’ve got their six numbers, I coach them on placing the highest numbers in their class’s key stats, just now mentioning how something like Strength is good for fighters, Intelligence is good for wizards, et cetera. I kinda give like one-liner descriptions of what each stat sorta represents, like Dexterity is how physically coordinated a character is and Constitution is how much a character can drink before they pass out. Just try to make things relatable at this point, which means for brand new players, referring to real life sorta things. 

Now, you might argue that actually rolling stats is a speed bump that could have been glossed over with either just pre-made stats or some kind of simple point buy or allocation formula, and you’re probably right. I’ve just found that, typically, rolling the dice at this point is usually a pretty fun thing for new players. It gets them into the mindset of rolling dice and calculating results, it’s a fun tactile thing to do that isn’t just writing stuff down and, what to me is the key feature here, this is what starts to make each character feel personal and unique to each player, you know, cause they rolled those stats with their own two hands, their own dice, they got their own results.

Rolling up stats is also a time-honored, classic tradition of tabletop rpgs, right, and I just want my players to have that experience, even if they never play again. But as you noticed, I don’t go with any of the more custom ways of rolling these totals, like my favorite which is rolling four dice and dropping the lowest number. Going with a straight three die roll per stat is kinda harsh but it also just gets rid of any extra math and extra explanations I’d have to do, which both take up time and can become needlessly confusing – so it is a little bit of gloss on that speed bump, if you will.

Glossy speed bumps. I gotta hire a writer.

After stats and their associated bonuses are notated on their sheets, all you have left is some gear and spells. For magic users, I would have already found out what kind of magic they find cool, you know, back when I was lobbing those softball questions. 

“Oh, you like the idea of casting magic spells. All right, what kinda magic do you think is cool? Do you like the idea of manipulating objects like Hogwarts students or do you think reading people’s minds is cool or do you just wanna blow stuff up?” 

So I’ll just hand them spell cards for some cantrips and a first level spell that I’ve already picked out for them. If I don’t happen to have commercially printed cards or whatever, I’ll typically find spell descriptions online and screen cap them and text them to the player.

For the non-magic users, it’s pretty easy: “Do you like hammers, axes, swords or bows and arrows?” I’ll rattle off a few weapon stats for them to jot down and that’s it, we’re ready to play.

Now, some of you may not agree that all the info needed to play a game is on this compressed character sheet and you, again, might be right. But for me, this works totally fine for a first session with newbie players. If they end up having a good time and want to play again, they’ll find a full fledged character sheet pretty cool and interesting having played a game and they usually have fun filling it out on their own.

So I did mention there was one other thing aside from players, characters, dice and a DM that’s necessary for playing a session of DnD, and that would be the “adventure” itself. I’ve got some specific ideas on what kind of adventure to run for brand new players but we’ll save that for next month’s rpg-topic video.

So, go dupe some dummies into playing DnD. That was completely crass and uncalled for, I just couldn’t pass up the alliteration. But you know what I really mean – go find some players who’ve never played DnD and see if you can trick them into sitting down at a table. Maybe that table’s in a bar, whatever works.

See ya at the pub!