Music to Game to: Ensemble Pearl - Ensemble Pearl

I listen to a lot of music (over 40 days worth in 2017 according to last.fm) and I find that few things help me keep the mood of a game foregrounded in my mind like a good soundtrack. Plus, I’ve discovered that when I’m playing music to a speaker via Bluetooth, I’m less likely to be on my phone, lest my players hear any stray sounds, letting me better model engagement during a game. To that end, I want to share some of my favorite music to game to; the albums that inspire and inflame my imagination and that I’ve found work well as background music for games as well. I’ll do a mini-review and cover the basics of what mood it helps me set.

ENSEMBLE PEARL – ENSEMBLE PEARL
Ethereal and haunting, this one off featuring members of Boris and Sunn O))) is much more restrained and subdued than you might expect. Guitar drones weave amongst patient, methodical drumming, with bass notes hitting like water drops falling from stalactites in some deep cave. Where Belatedly felt like the underground music of a lost dwarven civilization, Ensemble Pearl is the music of empty underground ruins. Whatever once was here, all that remains is ghosts.

• Vocals?...None
• Music Genre(s)…Experimental, Drone, Dark Ambient
• Perfect for…A soundtrack for deep and abandoned caverns or the emptier and melancholy places of the lower planes, like the prisons of Carceri or the plains of the Grey Waste.
• If you only grab one track, make it…“Sexy Angle”, a lugubrious march of echoing drums, droning guitar lines and ghostly bass with a wailing viola guiding it to a slow and patient climax.

Beyond the Wall - Further Afield Review

If you've read my review of Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures, you know I think it's a great game for zero-prep one shots, but with the addition of the Further Afield supplement it becomes a great game for ongoing sandbox campaigns. Even if you don't use Beyond the Wall, the Shared Sandbox creation rules and Threat rules are a great addition to any game master's repertoire. So what's in Further Afield that makes it a great supplement to grab?

• The Shared Sandbox. An entire chapter guiding you and your players through a collaborative sandbox creation setting (You can hear an example of this in our Session Zero Beyond the Wall actual play podcast episode).
• Not just a set of random tables, it has the players decide some of the details of a location and in a stroke of genius, has a roll for the GM to make to see how much of what their PC knows is correct. This means that a player has some investment in the locations but that they can't be certain they already know what's there until they send their PC there in game.
• After each player has created two locations, then each chooses a location another player created to embellish, adding another detail to the sandbox and letting players build off of each other's ideas.
• There are plenty of tips and hints for getting the most of the process and helping it go smoothly as well.
• After the players have filled in major locations, the game master will separately fill the map in with minor locations (You can hear an example of this by listening to my first Lonely Fun podcast, where I cover the prep I did for our Beyond the Wall actual play campaign).
• There are tips for integrating favorite adventures into the map, for respecting what the players already added and for working with the threats detailed in the next section of the book.
• Threats! Like fronts from Dungeon World, these are a great tool for having over-arching plot, driven by a villainous NPC or a magical phenomena. 
• They're more structured than fronts, and have an imminence rating that can go up or down according to player action (or inaction).
• At the start of each in-game week, the GM makes a roll and if it equals or exceeds the imminence rating then the threat is activated. Each threat has an activation chart of events that occur that could have direct or indirect effects on the PCs... for example, kidnapping children from the PCs' home village. Something the players might notice immediately or that they might only learn about when they return home after adventuring elsewhere.
• There are four pre-made threats in the book, all of which are intriguing, and more available for free PDF download. They can be neutral or even potentially helpful to the PCs, like the Imperial City that is expanding into the PCs' homeland or they can be completely villainous, like the Blighted Land that expands, devastating everything in its wake until the PCs defeat it.
• There are also guidelines for crafting your own Threats, which is something I'm trying out for the Antagonist Relations Beyond the Wall actual play podcasts, where I'll be making a Reptile Cult threat for my players to deal with.
• Running the Campaign / Travel and Exploration
• While not as potentially system-neutral as the Shared Sandbox and Threats, the advice in these two short chapters is very useful for anyone running a sandbox/hex crawl campaign.
• Optional Rules
• The remainder of the main portion of the book until the appendices is largely optional rules for Beyond the Wall. There's guidance for dealing with PC death and new characters, character traits which are like feats for BtW, advice and options for the experience system, more items, treasure and magic.
• Appendices
• The first appendix is a few more optional rules for BtW, but Appendix II: Sample Regions has some great generic encounter tables and Appendix III: Minor Locations is a great page of tables to quickly generate interesting locations on the fly or to use to fill out a hex map.
• Threats and Play Aids
• The four sample threats are here, the Blighted Land, the Grey Prince, the Imperial City and the Vengeful Wyrm. I've not had a chance to run a game with the Blighted Land, but the other three have been fantastic for driving the plot of my Wednesday Beyond the Wall campaign that's been running  since May 2017.
• The other play aids are great too, and you can find them for free at the Flatland games site! The Campaign Worksheet is used during the Shared Sandbox creation and Convenient Lunar Calendar could be used for any game that needs an easy to use and basic calendar.

Overall, I cannot recommend Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures and Further Afield enough. They're a great addition to any tabletop gamer's shelf. And while you pick those up, do yourself a favor and grab all the great free content they've put out there to support the game as well.

Tuesday Table - Snake Person Admixture

Since I'm home-brewing up a Reptile Cult / Snake Person Threat for the Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures actual play game that I'm running for the Antagonist Relations Podcast, I figured that I should make up a table to determine just what parts and snake and what parts are person for my snake people (or snersons, if you prefer)... Here's a 2d12 table to do just that...

2d12	Snake Person Admixture
2	Snakes instead of arms
3	Snakes instead of arms
4	No legs, snake tail
5	Scales instead of skin
6	Scales instead of skin
7	Legs and a snake tail
8	Cobra Head
9	Cobra Head
10	Forked tongue
11	Forked tongue
12	Snake Eyes
13	Snake Eyes
14	Snake Eyes
15	Forked tongue
16	Viper head
17	Viper head
18	Viper head
19	Legs and a snake tail
20	Scales instead of skin
21	Scales instead of skin
22	No legs, snake tail
23	Snakes instead of arms
24	Snakes instead of arms

Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures: Review

Pitched as "a zero-prep OSR roleplaying game you can play in an afternoon," Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures has quickly become one of my go-to games to run. Even better, with the addition of the Further Afield supplement, it goes to a game perfect for a no-prep one-shot to a game well suited to a low prep on-going campaign. First, though, why pick up Beyond the Wall?

• Easy to understand rule-set, that captures the feeling of AD&D with lots of the fidgety bits and rougher edges sanded off. Almost all the rules a player needs are summarized in a half-page as part of their playbook. Speaking of the playbooks...
• Innovative, evocative and easy-to-complete character creation. With 40 (FORTY) playbooks, almost all of which you can get for free in printable PDF format, there's no shortage of player character options. Named perfectly, each playbook title provides it's own summation of what a character will be much better than "Fighter" or "Arcane Trickster". A few of my favorites include.
• The Assistant Beast Keeper
• The Future Warlord
• The Nobleman's Wild Daughter
• The Reformed Bully
• The Would-Be Knight
• The Village Bear
• But not only do the playbooks walk a player through character step-by-step with 7 tables to roll randomly on or choose options from, Beyond the Wall uses those same tables to have the players (and gamemaster) collaboratively create the party's home village, generating locations, NPCs and ties between the PCs. (You can hear how that all comes together by listening to the Session Zero of our Antagonist Relations Beyond the Wall actual play podcast).
• The scenario packs for one shot games are well-designed, no-prep and tie into the playbooks well. The GM adds to the pre-made tables with NPCs and locations created by the players, which means that the PCs start with investments in the plot (You can hear how that ties in by listening to my Lonely Fun Beyond the Wall setup podcast episode.)  This means that the PCs aren't just going to random NPC A for information or hearing about weird location B for the first time in some block text, but that they feel like they helped shape the NPCs and locations that come up in play.
• Each scenario also features helpful suggestions and sample monsters to use during play, making them easy to use at the table.
• There are a few things that might throw some people off though...
• It's definitely low magic, Fireball is a 5th level ritual that takes 5 hours to cast.
• It has AD&D inspired saving throws that you have to roll above and ability checks where you need to roll below your ability score. (There are optional rules to avoid these in the book, but the assumption is the more OSR style).
• It's not built for players who want to created highly customized, min/maxed characters or strange combinations. The playbooks definitely focus more on character history than unusual class and race combinations. Also, while there are options for Dwarves, Elves, Gnomes and Halflings, Humans are decidedly the default.

Still, it is well worth picking up if you have any interest in having an easy to pick up and play, old school feeling system that's perfect for one-shots. And if you want to hear more about what Further Afield adds, click here to see my review of that supplement (spoiler, I like it just as much).

Podcast Episode 28 - The Return Of Rambling

Antagonist Relations Podcast Episode 28 - The Return Of Rambling

A return to Old School In the Lair of the Ginger Giant podcasts... Listen to Ben and I ramble on about the games we're running and playing in, recent inspirations and more. Topics include D&D 5th Edition, Beyond the Wall, 13th Age Eyes of the Stone Thief, AD&D 2nd Edition and more... Descend with us, once again, into the comforting depths of the Lair of the Ginger Giant for the Antagonist Relations podcast.

Zack's Recommendations

• Paper Girls
• Annihilation

Ben's Recommendations

• Wizkid's Wardlings (and other minis)
• Questminiatures

RSS feed for Podcast Apps

Music to Game to: Belatedly

I listen to a lot of music (over 40 days worth in 2017 according to last.fm) and I find that few things help me keep the mood of a game foregrounded in my mind like a good soundtrack. Plus, I’ve discovered that when I’m playing music to a speaker via Bluetooth, I’m less likely to be on my phone, lest my players hear any stray sounds, letting me better model engagement during a game. To that end, I want to share some of my favorite music to game to; the albums that inspire and inflame my imagination and that I’ve found work well as background music for games as well. I’ll do a mini-review and cover the basics of what mood it helps me set.

ORE – BELATEDLY

Full disclosure, I only heard about this album through the magic of The Quietus, an online music publication I’m proud to support, which pitched it partly as the work of “a half-man, half-tuba cyborg.” Recorded after the death of the composer’s father, veins of melancholy and grief run deep in this album but never overwhelm it. As a high school tuba player, I might have an extra fondness for the instrument, but its dark, rich tones give it a feel unlike modern rock instruments. Belatedly can be as droning and heavy as a SUNN O))) album in places, but feels less anachronistic for a fantasy game. You can easily imagine the songs echoing through the dimly lit tunnels of a dwarven mine.

• Vocals?... None.
• Music Genre(s)...Drone, Brass Band
• Perfect for...Bringing a bone deep and droning sense of melancholy or plunging your players deep underground.
• If you only grab one track, make it ..."Antimony”, where the tuba is backed by a thudding bass drum and could easily work as a dwarven dirge resonating in far below the surface in a deep mine shaft.

Potion of Frog Form - Weird Magic Item #2

Inspired by the incredibly excellent Weird Magic Item generator over at Donjon.bin.sh, I've been coming up with a few of my own system agnostic weird magic items to put in the many games I run, be they 13th Age or Beyond the Wall...

Eventually I want to try and put them into a randomizer, but I need to generate a few first. I'm going to try and post one every other Wednesday. Please let me know if you end up using an item I've created in your own game. You can find the entire series here...

Antagonist Relations Weird Magic Item Generator Presents...

Potion of Frog Form

This potion is the color and consistency of dirty brown swamp water, when you drink this potion you take the form of a tiny frog for 2d4 hours. While in frog form you have your normal intelligence, but otherwise have all the stats of a frog. While held in the hand of a sentient creature, you are able to speak any language that creature can understand. You can revert to your normal form before the duration is up by having a willing sentient creature kiss you.
A typical bottle of this potion contains 1d4+1 doses.

Tuesday Table - Medieval Surnames

Another little table I made for myself for my Beyond the Wall games, this one a table of Medieval English Surnames that seemed interesting and appropriate for my setting.

d12	Medieval Surnames
1	Appleby
2	Tallow
3	Bloodworth
4	Clay
5	Dyer
6	Gladwyn
7	Hardwick
8	Milton
9	Rye
10	Seward
11	Thornton
12	Whittemore

Find a second table of Medieval Surnames here...

Godless: The World of Fire and Blood (review)

GODLESS: The World of Fire and Blood

(You can read my review of Shadow of the Demon Lord here...)

This is the Shadow of the Demon Lord system with a post-apocalyptic setting bolted on and man, oh man, does it work better than I expected. There’s not a ton of alteration to the stuff from the base SotDL game, the ancestries get a post-apocalyptic background, the Clockworks become Transcendent, more cyborg than steeampunk. All the fey ancestries lose iron vulnerability and a few other things are tweaked, but for the most part it just adds the post-apocalyptic stuff. This does mean that you need a full copy of Shadow of the Demon Lord to play Godless, but you went out and picked that up right after my initial review on my recommendation, right?

It’s got all the strengths of SotDL: the stripped down, mostly intuitive, easy to run rules. The excellent path mechanic for advancement are kept, with a few new post-apocalyptic paths provided like Grease Monkey and Road Warrior. The specificity of the tables from SotDL, the interesting things that gave the game so much flavor are just as perfectly seasoned for a post-apocalypse in Godless; take this sample pair of interesting things: “A self-help book written by Tony Robbins” and “A bag of plastic toys made to look like food.” It sands off a little of the unevenness of SotDL as well, by leaving the setting largely unspecified, instead just providing suggestions for how to “Destroy Your World” to generate a post-apocalyptic Earth.

So what’s new? First, and one of the things I like best, are stories. Stories are a bit of character creation business in Godless, a more robust background mechanic than the core book. Which could be kind of confusing but look at it like this, the ancestry backgrounds are interesting, dangling hooks, a sentence or two, like this human background from Godless “An overprotective mother kept you locked in a cellar for your entire childhood. You escaped after she died.” Just a bit of strange character development meant to jolt a player’s imagination. The stories however, well, I’ll let Godless explain it “Characters in the World of Fire and Blood have endured much hardship and struggle before the game even begins. The stories of their past inform how they fit into the present and give guidance about how they might develop as the campaign unfolds.” Unlike the backgrounds which might give an interesting thing or a bit of corruption or insanity, each Story gives professions and a mix of benefits and hindrances. Take the Deluded story, for example…

Deluded

A rash of new religions appeared following the Cataclysm. Dismayed by the false promises in their holy books, people invented their own faiths—some new interpretations of the old, others invented from whole cloth. You follow one of these new religions and are called deluded because you cling to your faith in the face of the indifference of the cosmos.

• Professions: Gain one profession from the Fanatic table and one random profession.
• Strong Beliefs: When you would make a challenge roll, you can choose to make that roll with 3 boons. Once you do so, you cannot use this talent again until you complete a rest.
• Righteous: Your faith guides you through a world of unrest and uncertainty. After you complete a rest, you must spend 1 hour in prayer. Until you do so, you are impaired.

Brief, but flavorful, beneficial but not too constraining. A PC with the Deluded story could go on to take the Priest novice path, but it would work just as well for a Rogue, Warrior or Magician path. But tucked away there, where you might almost miss it there’s a little hint for the player for how their PC will interact with the world: “You follow one of these new religions and are called deluded because you cling to your faith in the face of the indifference of the cosmos.” The other nine stories are equally as good, providing both a launching pad for a PC and a sense of a character arc or direction for the player to keep in mind.

I didn’t get a chance to test out the Vehicle rules, but they look to straddle that sweet spot of providing enough options to have a really good car chase seen and not so many fiddly bits that it’s a massive pain to run. The new spells, creatures and items are all excellently suited to the post-apocalyptic feel and include things like explosives, zip-ties, spells to process fuel, tolerate radiation and the Inheritors (sentient man-sized cockroaches).

While there are only three adventures for Godless (as of March 2018), they are every bit as well-crafted and easy to run as the Shadow of the Demon Lord scenarios. I ran two of them, In a Pig’s Eye and Dancing in the Ruins.

***SPOILERS FOR THE ADVENTURES FOLLOW, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED***

Music to Game to: ASS

I listen to a lot of music (over 40 days worth in 2017 according to last.fm) and I find that few things help me keep the mood of a game foregrounded in my mind like a good soundtrack. Plus, I’ve discovered that when I’m playing music to a speaker via Bluetooth, I’m less likely to be on my phone, lest my players hear any stray sounds, letting me better model engagement during a game. To that end, I want to share some of my favorite music to game to; the albums that inspire and inflame my imagination and that I’ve found work well as background music for games as well. I’ll do a mini-review and cover the basics of what mood it helps me set.

ARBEIT SCHICKERT SCHNEIDER – ASS

This album might have a cheeky name, but it's got a serious lineage; Günter Schickert was among the first wave of Krautrock musicians, Jochen Arbeit was in Die Haut and now holds the guitar in Einstürzende Neubauten and Dirk Dresselhaus has been making music as Schneider TM since 1997. Without any vocals, these three let their guitars speak for themselves, beautiful distortions and half-imagined riffs rising and falling through the first half of the album (37° to 41°). The second half brings in more organic instrumentation, including an amazing conch melody (yes, a conch) on “Acetyl”. The album might be a little more suited to background for a science-fiction game like Numenera, but I think it would work for mood-setting in a strange fantasy environment like the underdark or the planar environments of the Planescape setting.

• Vocals? None.
• Music Genre(s)...Krautrock, ambient
• Perfect for...Bringing a sense of uneasy wonder.
• If you only grab one track, make it ...“Acetyl”, where the interplay of balafon, trumpet and conch transport the listener to an uncanny and half-dreamt place.

Thursday Table - What's in the Sack (Beyond the Wall)

While the Further Afield supplement for Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures has several great treasure tables, what it is lacking is a "what's on the body" type chart to determine items found on a low level foe. Since I'm running two Beyond the Wall games now, I've drafted up my own little chart that I can roll on to determine an interesting item and an amount of coin by rolling 2d12 twice.

What's in the Sack, a table of random items for Beyond the Wall

#	First Roll		Second Roll
2	A fine silver spoon.	&	1d8 gold coin
3	A child's doll.	&	1d8 gold coin
4	A live chicken.	&	2d6 silver coin
5	A bottle of fine drink.	&	2d6 silver coin
6	A lodestone.	&	2d6 silver coin
7	An inaccurate map.	&	2d6 silver coin
8	Parchment, quill and ink.	&	2d6 silver coin
9	A pocket-size book of trite advice.	&	3d4 copper coin
10	A small bag of salt.	&	3d4 copper coin
11	A woodcarving knife in a well-made leather sheath.	&	3d4 copper coin
12	A sewing needle and spool of thread.	&	Nothing
13	A ripe apple or small jar of pickles.	&	Nothing
14	A small bag of oats, wooden bowl and a spoon.	&	Nothing
15	A flute or other small musical instrument.	&	3d4 copper coin
16	A twisted yew branch.	&	3d4 copper coin
17	A length of fine satin ribbon.	&	3d4 copper coin
18	A piece of an ancient marble statue.	&	2d6 silver coin
19	A small bag of fine, white sand.	&	2d6 silver coin
20	A ram's horn.	&	2d6 silver coin
21	A small packet of Blue Hallows, Goblin's Bane or other useful herb.	&	2d6 silver coin
22	A faerie key made from spidersilk.	&	2d6 silver coin
23	A feather from a cockatrice, griffon, hercinia or other magical bird.	&	1d8 gold coin
24	A pouch with seven cold iron arrowheads.	&	1d8 gold coin

GM Tool - Dry Erase Crayons

So, last summer I discovered Dry Erase Crayons on clearance at a Target and thought, why not give those a try. Less than a month after trying them I bought a 96 pack and gave some away to all of my local GM friends as part of their Xmas gifts and I haven't used a dry erase marker myself since picking them up...

You might be thinking, well they're just crayons but...

• They don’t dry out. I used to grab two or three dry erase markers before I found one that left a nice clean line and I'd always have to be careful about putting the cap back on, but no more.
• They don’t smudge as easily and I no longer have fingers and hands stained black, blue and red the day after running a game.
• They're long lasting for DMs who are sketching a quick line drawn map. Some reviews say they don't last that long, but many of those reviews are about children using them roughly and no drawing implement lasts long under those conditions.
• They wipe easily with a microfiber cleaning cloth, even if some reviews imply otherwise, I've been able to clean all my dry erase surfaces quickly and easily with a microfiber cloth--even when I left the crayon drawing on a board for over a week as a test.
• You can get them really cheaply if you watch clearance sales at stores and online. My first set I found on clearance at Target, I was able to get a 96 pack for $25 on Amazon (currently up to $32 when this post was written, which is still 33¢ a crayon) and have found the Bright neon crayons on sale as well.
• You get the eight basic crayon colors in one pack, and after buying more than my fair share of dry erase and wet erase markers for games, it's great to know that you're going to get yellow, red, blue, green, brown, purple, orange and black. Plus, if you want more options you can get neon colors.

So far I've yet to find anything I did with dry erase markers that I can't do with these crayons and they have improved my GM game by letting me cut down time spent finding a working marker or hunting for a cap.

They look bigger in tiny hands... #teamtinyhands

Podcast Episode 27- Lonely Fun #1 - Beyond the Wall Setup

The very first Antagonist Relations podcast recorded outside the Lair of the Ginger Giant and first in my series of Lonely Fun solo podcasts.

Lonely Fun, of course refers to that time spent alone with an RPG book, dreaming up dungeons no one will play through or reading splatbook after splatbook.

I cover the additional setting creation I did for our Antagonist Relations Actual Play Beyond the Wall campaign.

Player created maps
GM Hex Map (not for player eyes)
Beyond the Wall - Across the Veil

Music to Game to: Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I & Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light II

I listen to a lot of music (over 40 days worth in 2017 according to last.fm) and I find that few things help me keep the mood of a game foregrounded in my mind like a good soundtrack. Plus, I’ve discovered that when I’m playing music to a speaker via Bluetooth, I’m less likely to be on my phone, lest my players hear any stray sounds, letting me better model engagement during a game. To that end, I want to share some of my favorite music to game to; the albums that inspire and inflame my imagination and that I’ve found work well as background music for games as well. I’ll do a mini-review and cover the basics of what mood it helps me set.

EARTH - ANGELS OF DARKNESS, DEMONS OF LIGHT I and EARTH - ANGELS OF DARKNESS, DEMONS OF LIGHT II

Tackling these two albums together for my first foray into ‘Music to Game To’. They’ve been in heavy rotation as gaming music since I got them in 2012. Don’t let the Doom Metal label scare you off or lead you to expect wailing riffs; these two albums are an hour and forty-five minutes of darkly shimmering harmonies. All in all the music conjures up an atmosphere of doomed romanticism– a sense of steady and heroic determination in face of tragedy. Evocative and lush, and while it rewards deep listening and careful attention, it doesn’t demand it, making it some of the best music I’ve found to have playing in the background of a fantasy RPG session.

• Vocals? None, it’s all instrumental, making it great for a gaming soundtrack.
• Music Genre(s)... Doom metal
• Perfect for... Slightly dark games where the heroes undertake epic quests against long odds.
• If you only grab one track, make it... The opener off Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I, “Old Black”, which starts slow and mournful and marches steadily to a crescendo of wailing cello.

Thursday Table - Medieval Thug Nicknames

I had thought that my Wednesday Beyond the Wall group was going to be heading to a city of "Ill Repute" next, but then they decided to go in the opposite direction. Still, a few weeks ago I put together a random table of Medieval Thug Nicknames for myself that I'm sure I'll put to good use eventually...

Medieval Thug Nicknames (d12)

1. Horse-head
2. Peacock
3. Wartooth
4. Splinters
5. Three-boot
6. Thumb-taker
7. Bloodeye
8. Daggertongue
9. Bull-breaker
10. Stone-skull
11. Water-maker
12. Hogbreath

Imp Collar - Weird Magic Item #1

Inspired by the incredibly excellent Weird Magic Item generator over at Donjon.bin.sh, I've been coming up with a few of my own system agnostic weird magic items to put in the many games I run, be they 13th Age or Beyond the Wall...

Eventually I want to try and put them into a randomizer, but I need to generate a few first. I'm going to try and post one every other Wednesday. Please let me know if you end up using an item I've created in your own game. You can find the entire series here...

Antagonist Relations Weird Magic Item Generator Presents...

Imp Collar

This collar is always found around the neck of a skeleton, it appears as a heavy iron collar around the skeleton's neck attached by a sturdy chain to a smaller collar. When a living being puts the collar on, it adjusts to fit them and then disappears. The now invisible collar is attached to an imp which perches on the left shoulder of the person wearing the collar and whispers advice to them. The Imp can also cast burning hands (or another appropriate low level fire spell) once per day. The DM should feel free to have the imps advice be suspiciously good or just suspicious, but it seems eager to serve its new master. The imp knows that it is fated to be chained to the collar until the world is broken in two (or the DM can use another apocalypse more suited to their campaign). The collar and imp should remain invisible to all but the most potent of divinations, so a True Seeing spell should reveal the imp, but a mere See Invisibility should not.
In play, the imp makes an excellent proxy for when the DM wants to remind players of something they forgot or overlooked, or to otherwise spur the PCs to interesting, if slightly unwise or risky courses of action occasionally.

I like BIG DICE...

and I cannot lie... (small dice for size)

Last year I discovered the joy of BIG DICE. Partly this was due to running 13th Age and needing a big d6 for the Escalation Die, but I've also found them to be great GM tools. What do I use BIG DICE for?

• Tracking enemy hit points. Perfect for bigger enemies with lots of HP.
• Keeping track of countdowns.
• 13th Age Escalation Die - Big wooden lawn dice work perfectly for this.
• Eyes of the Stone Thief Submergence Die.
• Terrifying players. Just set a die out and increase or decrease the number to your whim and watch players squirm.
• The pure satisfaction of rolling BIG DICE.

What's the advantage of using BIG DICE for these tasks?

• Easy to read at a glance.
• Harder to accidentally knock over. (I've found that metal dice are also good for this).
• Stand out from smaller dice. I only have a small number of BIG DICE so I'm not trying to remember if the wyvern hp total was on the sparkly black dice or the matte black with speckles dice.

Now I make sure I have my big dice handy for every game I run. You can find a set of your own at Dark Elf Dice, which is my favorite online dice store.

Consider this the first of what will hopefully be many short weekly GM tips as I continue to re-boot the blog.

The Podcast Strikes Back!

Announcing the return of the Antagonist Relations Podcast!

It's been a while, but we're finally back and we're going to shoot to record an actual play podcast the first Friday of each month. I also have other sinister plans for solo podcasts and hopefully the Ginger Giant and I will find time for RPG discussion podcasts now and then.

We're starting a new campaign for the actual play episodes that will used the Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures rules, In the latest episode we it down and create characters and a setting together as the PCs prepare to face the twin threats of a Cult of Sinister Snake People and the Risen Dead.

I've moved the podcast to it's own blog, mostly so that I can create an RSS feed that you can put into your favorite podcast listening app or program instead of having to download each file individually.

You can find that feed here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AntagonistRelationsPodcast and it should hopefully work in all your favorite podcatchers. I tried it out in Pocketcast, the app I use on my own phone, and it worked like a dream.

As always, get in touch if you have any questions or feedback either here in a comment or by email: antagonist.relations(at)gmail.com.

Expect more to come from this blog soon as I have some posts drafted up so that I'm ahead of the game and I'm trying to change up the look a little, among many other plans... Until then, enjoy catching up on the Antagonist Relations Podcast.