The adventurers are offered Bastions. Minla and Iris take up the offer and tree shapers are sent to create the bastions. Minla chooses to start off with a bedroom, kitchen, garden, and a library. Iris chooses to have a bedroom, kitchen, smithy, and armory. She also named it The Spiked Defenders.

The session starts off in Minla’s very cramped bastion kitchen. A strig in the employ of the Council delivers a letter to Minla explaining the Council’s need for the party to explore Hamlin’s rumor of The Loper because they are afraid of ignoring rumors after what happened with the fire elemental.

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.

The first time I played D&D my brother, the Dungeon Master, did the math for me. Later, when I was ready to start serving as the dungeon master for my kids we had dndbeyond. The character creator on dndbeyond does a great job of bringing together information from across the Players Handbook into one easy to use location. Since the web app is doing the math for the player, it’s easy to select various different options and see how the changes ripple through the system and result in different bonuses to the characters. It wasn’t until late last year when I was getting ready for Tales of the Valiant that I had to do character creation manually. (Kobold press does not maintain an automated character creation app) It took a LOT longer (as does leveling up), but I think it’s worth doing it at least once. (If not making it your default)

Once the party was back on the ship after the events with the mermaids they let Hal know that dragonfire is needed to melt the adamantine on the star. Hal consults his charts and they head towards the Archipelago where Lux lives. The since the adventurers have the star, the Blackrift compass points towards them. Many Blackrift ships approach and they’re boarded. They fight a Far Elf Lunar Monk and 2 Link Acolytes. Before more enemies can board, Aurora arrives and incinerates the ship nearest them. They end the battle and Aurora lands on the deck of the ship.

The only constant in the universe is change and so of course I should come to tabletop roleplaying games right when there’s a big shift. Dungeons and Dragons 5e came out in 2014, but I didn’t know that when I picked it up about 2 years ago at the behest of my kids. And it was D&D instead of Pathfinder because that’s what my brother had introduced them to at Christmas the year before. As soon as I spend a bunch of money on the big three source books (Players Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master’s Guide) they decide to revamp the game in 2024. Perhaps learning the (right? wrong?) lesson from D&D 3.5, they don’t christen this new version as 5.5e. The publisher, Wizards of the Coast, goes to great lengths to say that the game is both backwards and forwards compatible. That is, old adventures will work with new 2024 characters. New adventures (or at least recently published ones) will work with 2014 characters and monsters. Somehow in all that chaos I also found and became interested in Kobold Press’ Tales of the Valiant. Tales of the Valiant is a fork (in the free and open source sense of the word) of the 5e system. For now it remains highly compatible with D&D 2024. The forks may eventually diverge, making Tales of the Valiant the Pathfinder (which split off from D&D 3.5) of this generation. (The fork happened because of the OGL license scandal of 2023 when Wizards of the Coast attempted to change the terms of the deal. What I found interesting is that there was a certain feeling in the air - either among the players or the developers - that led to a lot of convergent evolution in both D&D 5.5e and ToV despite the ways in which they are different. (quick disclaimer to say that this isn’t a post about which is better or which you should play, just what I’ve noticed is different)

After dealing with the lich and the leviathan, the characters find themselves alone on the ocean. They sail on in the direction the compass directs. Eventually they reach a point where the compass is going in circles like it did when the leviathan was near. Everyone looks over the edge, but only Hazel and Amelia have the prior knowledge to recognize that they are above some merfolk architecture. They sail in the direction of the merfolk architecture, but are dragged a mile back by water elementals.

Introduction

When we got to this trilogy, we had already played every other trilogy in the DnD Adventure Club world. We’d mostly, but not entirely, gone through the adventures in order. DnD Adventure Club provides some very awesome, simplified, pre-created character sheets. Back when we played the introductory adventure (which is referenced in this trilogy) the GM guidance was to have one or more of the players be an orphan raised by Baba (I don’t remember if it’s explicitly mentioned before this trilogy that this is Baba Yaga of Russia lore, but we figured it out at some point). The kids looked at the backstories of the characters they chose, and it didn’t really fit with any of them, but they chose to have Sasha (Scarlett’s character) have spent some time in the orphanage that Baba runs at the outskirts of the Tumbledowns.

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.

This was our second non-kiddie Dungeons and Dragons 5e campaign after Humblewood. As it says on the tin, this is a very dungeon-focused adventure. I reviewed the first 3 adventures from the point of view of the Dungeon Master a while back. This is a session recap of the adventure as experienced by the players. If you’re not a DM, but someone who might play, there are spoilers below!

Note: we didn’t play in a VTT, I’m just using it to illustrate some key moments from each session.

Last year running the Humblewood campaign setting for my kids was the experience that really leveled up my skills as game master / dungeon master. I previously made a commentary post after the first session This post collects the session notes as well as my commentary on those session notes. Spoilers ahead if you plan to be a player in a Humblewood campaign (rather than GM/DM).

Session 1

Meadowfen

Player Character backstories

Minla

Minla was a normal Jerbeen in a big, happy family. Until a band of vulpin raiders came and, while plundering Minla’s family, killed her entire family.

Spend enough time on the internet, (especially /r/dnd or /r/dndbeyond) and you’ll come away feeling like TTRGPs are over, Wizards of the Coast is ruining your childhood, and a million other negative thoughts. But as I was watching the latest promotional video from Wizards of the Coast for the “2024” Monster Manual, I realized that the hobby is in the midst of a creative spurt. So I wanted to write this short post to share some joy as we start 2025.

Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.

It’s the last 2 days of the calendar plus some images of all the sets together and some final thoughts on the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.

Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.

The advent calendar is mostly at the point where I’m filling out the glittery dice set. But there was a big surprise on day 21!

Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.

This batch of dice contains my favorite die, topping the candle die from day 12. It also confirmed that I’ll be getting 2 full Dice Envy sets. A Dice Envy Set has the usual 7 plus a chonky d20, an oversized d6 with the Dice Envy logo and an infinity d4 (those pill-shaped d4s that I already got 2 of).

I don’t have time tonight for the photo editing required for my Dice Envy advent calendar post, but I did have time to turn your attention to a couple professionals in the TTRPG space that have done some retrospectives on the year. They also happen to overlap with my 2024 a bit, which is what made me want to share them.

First up, game designer Richard Green shares his year in 2024 TTRPG gaming. Mr Green worked on the Labyrinth World Book for the Kobold Press kickstarter that I pledged to. I’m excited about the concept behind the campaign setting as described in the kickstarter. The titular Labyrinth not only ties together worlds created by Kobold Press, but they encourage DMs to also use this to tie into campaign settings from Wizards of the Coast (since ToV is currently pretty compatible with 2025 D&D 5e) or from any other publisher of D&D or ToV content. I know I already have some plans to have a lot of fun with my kids and the 5e Multiverse once this book comes out some time next year. (I’m also interested in his Parsantium world which is also now an official world in The Labyrinth)

Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.

I thought that by not having to worry about solving the advent of code problems to write a post along with the dice I would be able to keep up with writing a post each day. Twas not to be as I’ve been incredibly busy at work recently.

Although the main sets are definitely the Elsa-blue and the glittery set, we had another of their neat pill d4s during this time period.

Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.

There isn’t too much to say today that I haven’t already said while going through this dice Advent Calendar. It looks like the two main sets are the Elsa-blue and the yellow-which-photographs-green-glitter. (Hmm…need a better name). Today it’s a d4 for the former and a d6 for the latter.

Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.

I got extremely busy with both work and my personal life, so I fell behind a bit. I also decided to drop Advent of Code from these posts (and from my life) as I can’t fit it in with the other things I’m busy with this month.

Time once again to review my Advent of Code solutions! The GitHub repo with all my solutions can be found here. Also featuring the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar; scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.

Advent of Code

Today I did not attempt the advent of code problem. It involved solving a word search in which there could be overlapping words as well as, if I read it correctly, multiple words starting from the same place. I’m guessing it’s to be done with a depth-first or breadth-first search in which you kill off searches if you can’t continue. I know these sorts of problems present themselves every year, but I never have time to learn during the AoC period (with work, life, and Christmas in the way) and I never make it a priority to relearn (I was taught this back in undergrad). So rather than waste my time on something I know that I won’t know how to do, I’ll save it for another time - maybe when I’m taking time off closer to Christmas/New Years Day.

Time once again to review my Advent of Code solutions! Also the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar; scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.

Advent of Code

As the years have piled on, Eric Wasl has thrown in references to past years’ problems. However, as of day 3 we now have 2 references (perhaps that’s what the historian story line is about). Day 02 had you visit the location of 2015 Day 19 and today visited the location of 2020 Day 2 (my first year doing Advent of Code!) The only thing I’m slightly worried about is if this signals that this year will be a grand finale for the annual event.

Time once again to review my Advent of Code solutions! Also the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar; scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.

December has finally arrived and with it my favorite activity of the month - Advent of Code! I also wanted to give myself a fun little present this year, so I bought the Dice Envy Advent Calendar. Every day I’ll get a fun new die (or dice!). Scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.

Advent of Code

Let’s start off with Advent of Code. This year I haven’t done any of the Advent of Code problems ahead of December so I was a bit rusty. One is not often using the same algorithms or libraries for Advent of Code as one does for everyday programming. I started off with Python since that’s my most comfortable language. First you can head over to today’s page to see the prompt. If you’re not solving the problems yourself, you won’t be able to see the prompt for part 2, so in summary:

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)

I mentioned before that my kids have, so far, been more about the D&D fights than the roleplay. (It’s a generalization, as they do ocassionally get into the roleplay). But a couple weeks ago when we were doing our Humblewood week (we’re rotating through a few of our different campaigns) Sam really impressed me by getting into the head of his character. He had been charmed by one of the characters and the spell specified that he would not attack the charmer. He would only attack the other enemies. I said, “it’s as if you were friends with her.” After a couple more rounds of combat he looks up at me during his turn and he says, “If she’s my friend. I would want to heal her, wouldn’t I?” I thought about it and didn’t see any flaw to the logic. (I also wanted to reward the creativity) So I told him that made sense. His only healing spell required him to get much closer to the enemy who had charmed him so he used his turn to start moving in that direction. The fight had been going on for a bit so his sister realized this could lead to a pretty bad situation so she decided to use her turn to grapple him and keep him from healing the enemy.

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.

As I was looking back over my old blog posts, searching for things that needed fixing in this migration over to the Hugo static site platform, I saw that I used to write brief blog posts about the Kickstarter campaigns I was backing. Since 2013 I’ve backed somewhere around 70 or more kickstarter campaigns. Since I usually don’t back anything that involves hardware, so far I haven’t had any of the campaigns disappear without giving me what I backed. Recently I realized I had backed an inordinate amount of D&D campaigns (I tend to fall pretty deep into hobbies). So I thought I might resurrect my Kickstarter posts to follow along with the D&D campaigns I’ve backed.

I can’t find the exact blog post, but some time in the last few months I had a throwaway line about how I was a little frustrated in how D&D’s digital assets were handled, particularly the fact that they are tied to platforms. That is to say, if I bought the 2024 Player’s Handbook on Roll20, I wouldn’t also have access to it on DnDBeyond. I think there are really 2 reasons this hasn’t blown up more: 1) many of the platforms only require the DM to purchase content (if it was required of all the players, I think there’d be a revolt) 2) D&D is still primarily an analog, pencil and paper game. That said, this issue has started to become a bit more relevant to me, so I wanted to get some ideas out there (and maybe vent a little).