If you’ve been reading my blog for the last few months, you know that I have fallen in love with the TTRPG publisher Kobold Press, creators of Tales of the Valiant. They recently held their second virtual convention, KoboldCon. I wanted to write up a quick review of what is effectively my first TTRPG convention.

First of all, the virtual aspect of the convention. During the COVID pandemic convention season (2020-2021), I attended quite a few virtual conventions - usually programming language conventions like PyCon. Many of those attempted to recreate the physical aspects of the convention like having virtual hallway tracks and profile areas where you can get to know your fellow attendees. Kobold Press went for a lower tech solution, but one that I think worked perfectly for what they were trying to do.

I covered the first 3 boxes from Dungeon in a Box back in October. I don’t want to repeat too much from that review, but here are some quick highlights:

• I get the physical subscription. It also comes with digital assets for each box as well as access to their Wonderous One-Shot digital assets.
• The digital assets include a Pathfinder 2e conversion
• each box comes with a gridded map for the dungeon portion of the adventure, skinny minis, and 1 or 2 3D printed minis.

This post is intended for dungeon masters. There are story spoilers below.

When I first played D&D with David maybe 3 Christmases ago, one of the most baffling things for me to understand was my character sheet. Take a looka t the first page of Sam’s Dungeon in a Box character sheet:

Ignoring how busy this page is, one of the biggest design issues I see right away is that all of the trait boxes are incorrectly prioritized. I have seen people argue for completely eliminating the scores from the sheet because you don’t ever use those scores. Instead, you use the modifiers (the +# or -#). Yet on this sheet those numbers are teeny, tiny compared to the numbers that are functionally useless. (Except during character creation) I would otherwise say there’s not too much that’s bad about this page - it gives you the information you will need most often. The second page has information you might need to refer to so that you don’t need to keep referring to the Player’s Handbook (PHB)

In my reflections on a year of being the family DM I mentioned we started playing the Dungeon in a Box campaign Voyage of the Fallen Star. It’s a monthly subscription that provides a connected story that takes place over a year. I’ve finished DMing the first 3 adventures, so I wanted to talk aobut my impressions with the content so far.