It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a blog post reflecting on being the family dungeon master for the past year. So I’m going to try and avoid repeating too much of what I wrote there. At the time that I wrote it, I wasn’t considering making tabletop gaming one of the topics I reflect on at the end of the year. However, it has become a pretty large part of my leisure and it may continue to grow in the amount of my free time that it takes up. I think, for this year, I will divide my post according to campaign. We’ll see what makes sense next year.

2024

DnD Adventure Club

I have written extensively on how DnD Adventure Club was a key stepping stone on my growth as a DM. In 2024 we ran The Wild Trilogy this summer. As I mentioned in the related blog posts, this was when my kids really started to get extremely creative with their play. Sam used his character’s strength to throw characters around. The girls used stealth in various dungeons. They thought of ideas like banging pots and pans to distract an owlbear.

After that, because the extended family never knows what to get the kids for birthday or Christmas, we didn’t buy any more of the trilogies. (spoiler for 2025 planning section - they got all the rest of the published adventures for Christmas) It was OK because we had a bunch of other campaigns to run in 2024.

We mostly (around 98% of the time) do “theatre of the mind” style play for this campaign. I’ll show them the NPC illustrations and, if relevant, the maps. We have only used their paper-doll style minis once or twice to figure out PC vs NPC positions during combat.

The adventures continue to entertain the kids (they haven’t aged out of them) and the writers are slowly evolving the world and starting to make more frequent callbacks earlier adventures. To be honest, at this point they could PROBABLY put out a campaign setting hardcover with the first dozen adventures and have a pretty decent product. The nice thing about these sessions is that they require next to no planning from me. I DO work a bit to make the world more immersive and make callbacks to things they’ve done in our sessions, but, overall, everything I need to do to run the game is spelled out. I’ll probably weave these between other campaigns when I need a break in planning.

Dungeon in a Box

I wrote up a review of the first three adventures and the concept as a whole a while ago. I’ll be doing another one after we finish our sixth session. That post was more from the point of view of the DM and whether it’s a good story and product. I also just recently posted a recap of our first five sessions that tells the story the kids and I are telling within the bounds of the pre-written campaign.

To take advantage of the maps and the 3D printed minis provided as part of the subscription, we play on the table with the minis on the maps. I am struggling slightly with the best ways to cover and reveal the areas on the map in a way that makes the dungeons more dungeon-y. In this new year I may look up some videos and/or blog posts about strategy around how to reveal the maps when playing exclusively a pen and paper campaign

As I’ve mentioned before, this campaign takes a few hours of preparation per session. After watching many videos and reading some opinion pieces, I’m of the mind that random encounter tables should not be used literally in the way in which they are presented. That is to say, at the table you roll a d-whatever every interval as specified. I’ve found it to be a much better experience if I look at the random table and choose the events and/or enemies that will mean the most to my players. For example, if one of my players is a druid and one of the encounters involves saving an animal - I would rather do that encounter than the one where they have to do a bunch of athletics rolls to cross a rickety bridge. I also need some prep time to get the monsters ready and queued up on my laptop. Other than 1-2 monsters per book, all the other ones have to be looked up in the D&D Monster Manual.

You can follow along with future recaps by following this series page.

Wondrous One-Shot

These are a monthly series of one-shots made by the same company that makes Dungeon in a Box. Because I don’t have infinite money, I don’t do the Wondrous One-Shot physical box add-on to Dungeon in a Box. I take advantage of the fact that buying the Dungeon in a Box gives me free access to the back catalogue of the digital version of the Wondrous One-Shot. Although we started a Christmas One-Shot while we were visiting my folks for Christmas, we have mostly made use of their Cooking Quest one-shots.

These one-shots show incredible creativity and I would strongly recommend them if you want to have a really fun time with your table and taking a break from your main story. Each of the Cooking Quest one-shots is essentially Iron Chef meets Dungeons and Dragons. Your characters have to harvest ingredients (usually, but not always) by killing monsters. There are rules about how good the final meal tastes based on how or when you kill the monster. Then your players are given recipe cards and they have to take those ingredients to make meals which are worth differing amounts of points. While they’re cooking the opposing team is usually causing mayhem and/or otherwise interfering.

We’ve played the first 2 (out of 3) online with my brother, David and they have been HILARIOUS! We’ve been playing on dndbeyond and the biggest amount of prep work comes from creating homebrew monsters for the game. I also usually spend about an hour or so getting familiar with the rules, maps, etc. Now that I’ve been getting more comfortable with FoundryVTT (which I bought for the Cosmere RPG - more on that later) I think I could potentially REALLY simplify gameplay (at the cost of some programming time) with a module that could automate things like the taste value of the ingredients, etc. We’ll have to see how easy this would be vs my desire to spend the time required, but it could be a lot of fun.

There was another Cooking Quest released around Thanksgiving (with a turkey tie-in) that I (and the kids) would LOVE to play with David in the new year.

Humblewood

As I wrote about in my year one recap, Humblewood was my first time stepping up into a “real” dungeon master role. I’ve used the campaign to learn how to plan for long-term story arcs and how to improvise in the gaps between the published story beats. I wrote about the first session here and I wrote a recap of the entire first year here. We played in a hybrid mode. I would build the encounters ahead of time in the dndbeyond encounter builder. I would also get the maps ready where they were provided. I would put them on the TV and move the tokens around as directed by the kids. But for their characters they did physical dice rolls.

Prep time for Humblewood was higher than DnD Adventure Club, but lower than Dungeon in a Box. A lot more was provided by the campaign. For the main campaign (before I got to Humblewood Tales and other one-shots) all the NPCs, monsters, subclasses, and items were already built into dndbeyond so I didn’t have to spend any time homebrewing them. The biggest prep work lay in the fact that Humblewood was, at its core, a giant mystery story with smaller episodes (some of which were also mysteries). So I wanted to make sure that I was properly laying the clues that would lead to the larger reveal at the end. The campaign also had LOTS of branching paths because there were many characters that either would or wouldn’t be there based on character actions. So I had to know which subsection to jump to for any chapter. I also enjoyed printing out various handouts for the kids.

You can follow along with future recaps by following this series page

Tales of the Valiant

I have not yet written my Tales of the Valiant recap because I don’t want to keep delaying the publication of this blog post. (We’re almost in February for crying out loud!) This is meant to become our big, main campaign in 2025, so more about that in that section. So far it hasn’t been too much work to prepare for any given session, but since we had to do the character creation and leveling manually, that has taken a lot more time than with D&D.

Kickstarter

As I wrote back in October, I went a little crazy with Kickstarter campaigns in 2024. Because of DnD Adventure Club I severly underestimated how long a D&D campaign takes. I thought I would need lots of campaigns queued up for the kids. Alas, most of these go unplayed. (And a greater amount will be delivered in 2025).

Dice

I bought a Dice Advent Calendar. You can see those dice (and any other dice posts) by going to my dice tag page. “I probably don’t need any more dice,” (the dice goblin said, lying to himself)

Plans for 2025

Midgard and Tales of the Valiant

This will be my big leveling up as a Gamemaster (pun intended!). I have Kobold Press’ Midgard, Zobeck, and Margreve books. I have a plan to mix an overall homebrew story with some of the pre-written adventures or adventure-hooks from the various Kobold Press books. I’m excited and I’m a little scared. But I have lots of great plans to tie the larger story into my players’ backstories. I can’t wait to see what they think!

DnD Adventure Club

As I mentioned in the 2024 section, the twins got the rest of the published adventures for Christmas. For some time now the kids, especially Scarlett, have been lamenting that they’re stuck at level 2. When I looked through their new books, I saw that DnD Adveneture Club is now routinely printing the mods necessary for leveling up (up to level 5), so we will finally start doing higher level play. The kids are very excited about this.

New Gamemaster Month

I’m currently participating in New Gamemaster Month as I write this blog post. I’m learning lots of little things that I’ve missed in my self-directed learning. I’ve also become more active on some TTRPG discords and am getting lots of great advice. The coolest part is that at the end of the month I’m going to run my first ever game that wasn’t for family members. I will definitely post about it on this blog afterward.

Kickstarter

New Kickstarter Campaigns

I’m actually trying VERY, VERY hard to pull back on getting involved in any new campaigns. Based on my experience with Dnd Adventure club I misjudged how long it takes to get through campaigns. I already have too many that I’ve bought on Kickstarter or dndbeyond. This Year I’m focused on only backing campaigns that are focused on expansions to my current campaigns.

• Humblewood 2 - This one is a no-brainer. My kids have been asking for this ever since we finished the first book. The first game was in a European (or American?) forest climate. The new book takes the characters to a South America-like region. I’m excited about continuing the larger story, using what I’ve learned as a DM to add more value beyond what’s written, and having fun with the kids.
• Kobold Monster Vault 2 - Kobold Press’ first Monster Vault was mostly about converting D&D SRD monsters to the Tales of the Valiant system. This new book is about opening the floodgates to creativity. I’m most excited about the (already achieved) stretch goal that provides the Field Guide to Monster Harvesting. This will give my players more of reason to want to fight rather than seeing it as an annoying part of TTRPGs.
• Kobold Press seems to be teasing something yet unrevealed about Midgard. I may have My guess is that just like the current Midgard book was a Pathfinder to 5e conversion (that pushed the timeline out 10 years) that this will be a 5e to Tales of the Valiant conversion that will move things up another 10 years or so. (Seems to go together with the fact that things changing as soon as I join like 5e becoming 5.5e one year after I got involved)

Backed, but not yet Delivered

• Enter the Labyrinth - This will be a large part of our Tales of the Valiant campaign when it comes out (supposedly June).
• Cosmere TTRPG - I backed this last year. I can currently playtest on FoundryVTT. I think it officially comes out this Fall. I’m hoping to get together with some friends from work to run this.
• Faster, Purple Worm! Everybody Dies, Vol 1 - I backed this one last year and I’m excited to try out the chaos. I have someone specific in mind that I want to pitch this to.
• 80s Adventures - A series of awesome D&D adventures that parody 1980s movies like slasher flicks, camp movies, and even a Die Hard parody. I know the perfect person to anchor this around and I hope together we can find a group to run these adventures. It would be one of the highlights of 2025 if we could.

• Monster Trainer’s Handbook: 5e Campaign Supplement & Setting - basically Pokemon-style D&D! Stella backed this and I can’t wait to play it with her and her siblings!
• The All New Gobber’s Guide to Hearth and Home - This one could be a dark horse winner. I bought it before the Wizards of the Coast came out with their 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide in which they introduced the Bastion system. I meant for the kids to use this, especially in DnD Adventure club where they used some of the money from their adventures to build up some houses.

Other TTRPG posts from this year

Finally, a few TTRPG posts I made this year that aren’t directly related to the campaigns I played.

• What is the best D&D Character Sheet? A Comparison
• Frustrations With Digital TTRPG Sourcebooks
• Bite-Sized TTRPG Adventures

• End-of-Year
• Tales of the Valiant
• DM
• GM
• Dungeon-Master
• Humblewood
• DnD
• Dungeons-and-Dragons
• Dnd-Adventure-Club
• Woundrous-One-Shots
• Midgard
• Kickstarter
• Kobold-Press