ScottVee Gaming

As much as adventuring is the obvious heart of D&D and other RPGs, sometimes my mind just wants to take it slow and settle down for a while.  Sticking to my current study of the old T1 Village of Hommlet over in the Greyhawk setting, it clearly focuses on the things you need to know for the encounters facing you.  And after those quests are done, you are expected to move on to other towns in other modules.  But what if you stick around?  What if you want to just follow some of the NPCs through their lives?  Can the town itself evolve over time? First, the NPCs listed in the module are all living in moderate luxury with no mention of clutter or mess or farm animals, each with about a hundred GP tucked away.  Their little treasures sound so out of place.  I suppose they were just added to boost the treasure-to-xp total you can get while in town.  The goal of the module is to get 3 or 4 players from level 1 up to level 2 or 3.  So I guess you have to break into every hous

I watched almost an hour of videos last night about DM experiences with the Village of Hommlet.   Partly to refresh my memory, and also because of how interesting it is to me that some of these little booklets hold so many memories for so many people.  Since that was the first real "home base" village in RPG history and it was the starting point for the big Temple of Elemental Evil series, it is certainly an iconic location in fantasy gaming history. It is now considered to be located in the Greyhawk campaign setting. This video was all about how a DM should prepare to run the module, and the host showed a ton of content he posted on World Anvil to get all the information just one click away, including an extra illustration of the Inn he commissioned, and hand-outs of the actual menu.  I guess we do have to optimize the content a bit, and there are a variety of sites and tools to help do it.  It's funny how the map has all the buildings nicely numbered, and

If you do choose to pay to skip all ads, those boxes still have the video icon on them, but if you click it, it skips the ad and unlocks the box.   Level 10 (Casa Village) is a new base camp which adds a new Adventure space.  A Guard next to this space says it's full of powerful demons and "why would you want to go inside?"  The first level of the adventure is Lost Castle with a 5200 hp Lich.  I'm level 60 right now (890 HP, 220 AP, 577 ATK, 335 DEF and 222 RCV), and I can get take out roughly 3500 hp of bad guys, but by using the Herbs right next to it I was able to beat that Lich.  Just an idea of the level balance.   The Story mode does continue with Stage 11 (Unrest) where the mobs have about 3900hp, and at level 64 I can get through them with about 10% to spare.  One of the Stone spaces had an entrance to a Cave level.  Clever.  It leads to a stage called "Crypt Passage" with a bunch of large angry bears.  Story levels pop up a bit of story

I have been reading articles on the Vaults of Pandius again.  That's the big hub of Mystara (an early D&D campaign setting) fan content, ranging from half-baked ideas and unfinished notes to some very detailed scenarios, home of Threshold Magazine and links to tons of top-notch maps by Thorfinn and others.  On the odd side, when I did a search for a Mystara map of a specific area, I got a bunch of links to items on Etsy where people took those classic, recognizable maps and slapped them on a bunch or random products -- phone cases and such.  I seriously doubt that any f these "crafters" owned any of these images or cared who did own them.  We're living in a world where people just steal images left and right to try and make a buck for themselves. Aside from that, Mystara is such a playable world.   It has always struck me as the official D&D game world as far as the tone goes.  It started off as the "Known World" way back in the Isle of

I have been replaying old apps I hadn't seen in a while, and also shopping the Play Store for a new RPG that has any kind of actual character, and it has been enlightening.  Hundreds of these games apps are out now, all so similar and so bland, just click things to get points and items and coins, upgrade the things, fight the things to get more things.  I don't ever feel like I'm in a location or part of a story or campaign, not the way you would walk into a town in a classic RPG and meet all the shopkeepers and stay at the different inns and hear about powerful wizards up in the mountains or when the next pirate ship is docking.  Sure, the numbers are so much bigger than they were when we were tossing out own d20s around and maybe doing 2d6 of damage.  Now, your imaginary little people can do hundreds or thousands of points of damage, and heal 75 hp per second, or whatever the heck is going on.  But bigger numbers don't make it more exciting or feel more

Over lunch of Saturday, Doug & I were talking about various versions of D&D, and for a while he was explaining how 4th Edition spawned off Pathfinder.  I got the Pathfinder beta about 2 years ago, groaned at how dense it was and it had no sample adventure to try, and tried reselling it with the stacks of game books I list on various groups from time to time.  Somehow, when I checked facebook later that day (which I hardly ever do anymore because it has become such a flood of ads), there was an ad for a Humble Bundle of ... you guessed it ... 28 Pathfinder books in PDF format for $30.  Technically, it was $25 or pay what you want, and I don't want to be the cheapest guy on the planet, so I always click the second or third payment amount button on these.  I don't know how the webz knew it had come up, but sure, $1.50 went to some charity and I got about 1000 more pages of PDFs to clog my brain.  It was a little misleading, though, since some of those PDFs wer