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.