A blog about fantasy and horror gaming
After what feels like an inordinate amount of time, we finally finished Adventure B5: Horror on the Hill. We started this one back in the fall of 2024. My longtime gamer group is supposed to meet twice a month on Sunday nights, but most of the time we ended up meeting once a month. So, almost a year later, we finally finished. I’m wondering if in the future we need to convert these guys to more of…
Our ShadowDark-based Curse of Strahd (COS) campaign ("Holiday in Barovia") has been motoring along at a fine pace. We're very consistent, playing most weeks, although the sessions are short. The party is well into the mid-game, with most characters now 4th level. (That shows how far behind I am on written updates!) They call themselves 'The Drips', let's check in on what's happened. Cast of…
Here are some overdue files that support running Curse of Strahd... for ShadowDark. Monster conversions Plot hooks XP Tables You'll still need your own copy of the WOTC hardcover book. The monster conversions are straightforward; I took a lazy approach on the spell-casting monsters by pointing to an existing spell-casting monster so I could crank out all the conversions fairly quickly. I may…
If you're new to this series about running Curse of Strahd as a sandbox for ShadowDark, there have been a few other posts ( here ). The previous post relayed the "gauntlet" I ran for the party, which brought a set of zero-level peasants from the capital city of Specularum, in the Grand Duchy of Karameikos, through a haunted house, The Death House; when they left Death House they discovered they…
On a quest for novelty and learning new things, I've produced a video. A few things quickly became apparent... there is a significant learning curve at work, from being able to speak comfortably on camera through knowing video editing and picking engaging topics. (If any of that matters, look elsewhere dear reader - I'll need some time - I'm sure it will take a few months to ascend said learning…
This is part game report and part walkthrough of how I set up the campaign. I've previously said background prep for the campaign (before the first session) involved converted all the monsters from 5E to Shadowdark; next I broke down all the plot hooks by location to understand how the whole campaign would hang together as a sandbox; I also tallied up the experience points available in the…
I've been enthusiastic about Shadowdark since I first picked it up. Now that I've been playing it for several months across a couple of campaigns, I can write a critique that's not just an academic exercise or armchair quarterbacking. I also updated several home brew adventures to Shadowdark recently and ran them as dungeon crawls at last week's Philly area gaming expo, so I've had experience…
I ran 3 games of Shadowdark at Philly Area Games Expo (PAGE), a convention that seems to be gaining some traction in the area here in it's second year. There were plenty of YouTubers and ex-TSR era and WOTC designers at it. I sat in on some seminars, including OSR tavern keeper Tenkar talking about the jump from blogging to video. Interesting stuff. I ran 3 home dungeons 3 home dungeons adapted to…
I love the Jim Holloway art from this era of Basic D&D We missed a lot of time with this campaign! Several of the players are die-hard Eagles fans (go birds), and there was a run of late afternoon games on Sundays or Sunday nights which displaced RPG game nights, so I think we've only played 2-3 times since October when I last checked in on this campaign. Our cast of characters has reached level 2…
One of the most important things I needed to do for myself to simplify Curse of Strahd (COS) is related to the book's presentation. It's presented as a sandbox campaign, with a full-sized hex-crawl wilderness map (the Valley of Barovia), a full-sized dungeon (Castle Ravenloft), and then 12 other adventure sites comprising villages, smaller dungeons, or wilderness sites. The issue I've found is…
I started running a game with my neighborhood gang for Horror on the Hill , a classic module from the 1980's. Meanwhile, my high school group voted to do Curse of Strahd . The high school gang was formerly "The Pillories", the party that played Lamentations of the Flame Princess over the past year and recently wrapped their campaign. Originally we were going to do a Call of Cthulhu next, but I…
Herein lies the tale of our abrupt and terrifying end to Death Frost Doom . As if it could end any other way. When we last met with The Pillories, their halfling, Remi Knotwise, had crawled through an air vent and landed in a hidden part of the dungeon, the tomb of an undead horror (the Exalted Inquisitor). After realizing he was trapped in the tomb, and taking some horrendous internal and psychic…
My youngest son's football team had a "bye" this weekend so I had some extra time Saturday and put together a few maps for our Horror on the Hill Shadowdark game. ("Horror on the Hill" refers to the old TSR-era adventure module B5 The Horror on the Hill). First up is Guido's Fort - a frontier stockade sitting across the river from the ominous "Horror on the Hill". I put a small frontier settlement…
I started a second game a month or so back with one of my older gaming groups running Shadowdark . We had all ended up at the same end-of-summer barbeque, started talking about games, and realized several folks in the old guard wanted to give Shadowdark a try. I had recently become enamored of the rules as well, and so the idea for a new campaign was formed. This is basically our first game…
Our cast of characters continues to explore Death Frost Doom (DFD), but the ending of last game session was perhaps one of my favorites. First - about Death Frost Doom. In the early OSR period (pre-2010), this stood out to me as an adventure that took D&D style gaming in a new direction. Once I started running a game with my old high school friends, I knew this was an adventure that we'd work into…
I've continued to spend time with the Shadowdark rules and we're going to try this out in a few weeks after we've wrapped our current LOTFP game. Character creation and advancement, adventuring, combat, monsters, there are many things in Shadowdark that look like they will play great at the table. Shadowdark reminds me a lot of what I first loved when discovering the original Moldvay basic book…
I've studied the Shadowdark rules. I love them. We're certainly going to run a dungeon crawl using Shadowdark once the York 1630 campaign reaches a good resting spot. After that, who knows? One player is clamoring for a Call of Cthulhu campaign; this group has never experienced the glory that is Dwimmermount ; I also want to take a look at the recent Lamentations campaign, A True Relation of the…
The large American gaming convention (Gencon) just wrapped, including the annual Ennie Awards. The game Shadowdark cleaned up a bunch of awards - best product of the year, best game, best rules, and best layout and design. They ran a million dollar kickstarter last year, and now this thing has become a movement. They achieved that critical escape velocity that let them leave the fantasy…
I like this adventure quite a lot - Death Frost Doom. It showed how an adventure module could be game-breaking, campaign-breaking, in a way that wasn't really done before. Sure, Tomb of Horrors could nuke a 14th level party, but it's not like the stakes included Acererak leaving the tomb and wrecking their home town. I struggle to recall a TSR adventure, or even a WOTC-era adventure, that…
The premise of Strict Time Records Must Be Kept is that the player characters have been dosed with a slow-acting, fatal poison while isolated in a trap-filled mansion, where they search for doses of antidote. The set up involves a wealthy patron betraying the group, ostensibly to create entertainment value for haughty, wealthy guests. When I conceived the concept of the York LOTFP campaign, a year…
It's been a minute since I've posted here at the Dream House. My corporate alter ego has been busy - my company is merging with a French business, and acquisitions are busy times anyone in IT. It's been good though, I've enjoyed visiting Reims and trying to pick up French. My gaming group has been diligent about maintaining the LOTFP campaign, and the players have a few new adventures under their…
This capsule review will have spoilers. Here's some boring facts about the book up front to avoid diving right into the spoilers. The Curious Conundrum of the Conflagrated Condottiero (henceforth referred to as "4C" for the rest of this review) is 26 pages, with Kelvin Green doing the writing, art, and cartography, as he is known to do. It's 26 pages and you can get the PDF here: 4C on…
I've been away a while - 6 weeks! I have several alter egos, in one of them I lead a global IT department and spent the last month of the year focused on "landing the plane" - making sure we delivered annual commitments and finished the critical projects. Then the kids came home from college (I have two in college right now! A senior and a freshman) and then it was off to Mexico to spend time with…
Before I forget - Adventurer Conqueror King is coming out with a second edition. The kickstarter is in the last 24 hours. Alex had been posting playtest versions of the rules and we've been using them in our bi-weekly Greyhawk game - he's created procedures for thief skills and dungeon crawling that we've found immediately useful in our Temple of Elemental Evil campaign, so I'm looking forward to…
Get yourself a blender, pour in a parody of Winnie the Pooh, a heap of The Island of Dr Moreau , a pinch of seasoning from Animal Farm , and some references to the Kelvin-Verse, and you've got the adventure locale for Winnie the Shit , Kelvin Green's latest offering for the LOTFP line. This one is a 48 page hardcover with Kelvin doing the writing, cover, and interior art. This is a solid addition…