50 Years of Dungeons and Dragons

 I've been playing for 43 of the 50 years D&D has existed. 

Stage Fright - Dungeon Magazine 77

Here's one ripe for expanding a bit. It begins in a theatre which can be just about anywhere in Ptolus. This one would probably be in Midtown or one of the two Market districts.

The plot involves a mishap during a summoning that was supposed to be a scary special effect for a play.

In the original scenario a Red Slaad gets summoned, gets out of a flawed magic circle, kills a bunch of actors, implants one with an egg, and then poof, back to it's plane of origin. We know that last part won't work in Ptolus so it most likely goes out on the town. If it did go rampaging there could be other infections to deal with. 

Most likely the City Watch or some nearby delvers would have taken the Slaad down. Maybe the characters were the delvers that happened to be there. Plant that encounter in the campaign some time before this scenario.

Three months are almost up and the Slaad Tadpole inside the theatre owner is about to burst out of him.

The scenario intends for the player characters to be in the audience when things go wrong again. Maybe they received tickets to this show as thanks for their help last time.

The lead actor and theatre owner hatches the tadpole from his insides right on stage and promptly dies. The tadpole rips up a piece of the stage floor and slithers into the basement.

It's here that we see if the PCs will jump into action or let matters get worse. Delaying action gives the Slaad time to morph into more mature forms becoming much more dangerous.

If the characters defeat the Slaad, the City Watch will show up shortly afterward.

The theatre will go out of business after this event. Maybe a bard character will show interest in buying the place.

Fruit of the Vine - Dungeon Magazine 76

 This is another of those, made for one session, type of adventures. It will fit well in Ptolus' Midtown district.

Somehow a Yellow Musk Creeper that hybridized with an Olive Slime has taken root on an abandoned property that was once owned by a delver. An interested party is looking for a new place and goes in to investigate, becoming infected.

The infected individual is acting on a compulsion to draw others in to get infected.

An encounter in the market is what gets the player characters involved. Ideally they go to investigate the house.

In the abandoned house here's a comedic beat concerning a bathroom filled with potentially explosive gas and having a stuck door.

The chimney contains a slimy cat zombie.

Out in the garden shed are three dog zombies. Bits of food litter the yard and have been put there to lure animals in to become infected.

The corpse of the former owner can be found in the bedroom. He stole from the wrong person and was poisoned. This can lead to another adventure because the trapped ring he stole that killed him was meant for the wife of someone the carrier wanted to marry, and needed to get the wife out of the way.

There's a box of adventuring gear under the bed that includes a dagger with a command word on the blade. This lets the wielder turn invisible.

Destroying the Olive Creeper results in victims that have not yet become slime zombies recovering. You may want to complicate this just a bit by requiring a low level restoration spell or cure disease.

One Year Ago the OGL Scandal Broke.

 January 4th of 2023 delivered the news of what Wizbro was up to in the way of trying to revoke the irrevocable Open Game License. The backlash was immediate and huge. It eventually led to them walking things back and putting 5e into a Creative Commons license by way of apology.

You can easily find a wealth of information about the matter on YouTube and elsewhere so I won't belabor the point in this post.

MCDM RPG - Yup, 4e on Steroids.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C1HNP0H3Zw

I have come to the conclusion that at present, this isn't for me. I cancelled my pledge on Backerkit and my Patreon subscription. I will revisit this in mid 2025.

MCDM RPG - 4th Edition on Steroids???

 If you have watched enough videos by Mathew Colville you may know he is quite fond of D&D 4th edition. To him 4e represented heroic high fantasy with a tight focus on tactics. Unfortunately for D&D, most of the existing audience was expecting to continue on with a mostly dungeon crawling, exploring, resource tracking style of system, and Wizards did nothing to advertise or explain this shift. So is the MCDM RPG 4e reborn?

I signed up to the MCDM Patreon for $8/month to get my hands on the playtest packet. It turns out that the games will have many aspects in common, but I feel from what little I have seen that the new RPG dice mechanics and design will separate it from the predecessor in all the right ways.  

The core mechanics in the playtest docs and as described in videos about the game have me intrigued enough that I will likely remain a backer despite my dislike of 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons. Note: I bought a lot of 4e books to give it a thorough chance before determining it just wasn't my thing.

Fourth Edition had too much of a video gamey, button pushing, Magic: The Gathering tap/untap/burn feel. I can still see some of that here, but the design choices so far have not fallen into that same repetitive rut. Unlike 4e the characters become more badass as play proceeds instead of wearing down to where the boss fight will be a slog, hitting the same at-will button every round.

Among the pre-generated characters in the playtest packet is a Conduit (cleric). This character is unarmed, carries no melee weapon of any sort, instead relying on a ranged cantrip. What happens if the enemy is in the Conduit's face? I do find this jarring since I would prefer to tone down the starting capabilities of these characters just a little.  Not everything needs to be conveniently solved with an overabundance of magic, even if the 1st level characters are already heroes.

I won't be able to pass judgement on this yet, though I will be watching closely till just before the crowd funding campaign on Backerkit ends.

 

The MCDM RPG

 https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/mcdm-productions/mcdm-rpg

I recommend checking out this in-development game on Backerkit. The designers are top notch, well respected, and known for delivering what they promise.

While it won't be a giant killer (who the hell has the money to take on D&D) it is gaining a significant amount of grass-roots support with over 20,000 backers as of this writing.

Spend the 51+ minutes watching the intro video, you'll know what this game is being designed to do and have a good solid idea if it is something you would want to play.

I just backed it since I feel this deserves to be supported. Sure, it isn't expected to release in full until June of 2025, but the makers clearly state why - they want it to be great in all ways.