Hook and Chance

Sorcerers are channelers of cosmic power, and that's rad. They don't need all that book-learning, they've just got that something special. Roleplaying that something special can be a little tricky, however, and figuring out how a sorcerer might behave has never been as obvious as some classes. Our pitch is that sorcerers that draw from the chaos of magic is shockingly similar to artists that draw from the chaos of creative inspiration. So, we read The Mind of the Artist: Personality and the Drive to Create by Dr. William Todd Schultz, and boil it down to what we can use to play our most fascinating sorcerers yet.

Kuo-Toa seem like just another throw-away low-level mook at first glance. But with a little attention paid to their strengths, they can become a powerhouse of creepy, unsettling, off-putting, and downright nasty gameplay. Bring their god-conjuring freakiness in full force to your party.

Special celebrations can be a great addition to your games. You can use them to flesh out and ground your cultures. You can use them to add to the backstory of a character. You can use them to insert some truly bizarre events that wouldn't otherwise fit. Weirdly, you can even create traditions in your games that your players are excited to come back to! The possibilities are many, and this is why we wanted to cover how to create great holidays quickly.

Trying to respond to spells like Detect Thoughts can be tough. The challenge for a DM is either improvising a rich inner world for every NPC or revealing your secrets too soon due to a single spell. That's why we wanted to tackle this one. It threw us some serious curveballs when we were new to running the game. In this episode, we get into what surface thoughts are, how to simplify them in your own mind, and an option for making the spell part of a tense scene where information is teased out slowly, rather than as a single move.

There's nothing worse than trying to introduce a character you think is going to kick off the adventure with whoops and hollers, but ending up with everyone leaning back, getting hungry, and talking about the cool movie they're gonna watch once this game is over. In this episode, we're going to learn to create characters that engage. Characters that get players to lean in. Take notice. All of a sudden they care where the story is going because this new character is a part of it.

As newer DM's, we would prep for games by throwing d&d spaghetti at the wall and trying to see what would stick. It was a mess. This podcast is about finding systems and structures that help with that, to consistently play great games. Well, it's pretty rare we discover something simple that can be applied to every layer of our prep and our collective storytelling, but that's what this episode is about. We hope these steps help you as much as they did us.

There are a million ways to conduct a session zero, and a lot of them will work. The basic thing to keep in mind is getting everyone on the same page, and the more we learn, the more we realize this means so much more than telling your players what the game's gonna be. In the effort to continue our education, we have an awesome guest joining us for this episode. David Rae, a talented comedian, improv performer, and DM, shares with us how he goes about getting his players invested.

Goblins get plenty of attention, and we love the classic chaotic little beasts. A lot of the time, they end up wherever a game master needs something to fight. But this episode is all about getting into a goblins head and figuring out what they're really up to. Next time you use goblins in a game your players will learn to fear the relentlessly clever survivability the goblin brings to every encounter.

Halloween is creeping up like an Allip creeps through walls, and we are bringing you another monster episode that really fits the tone for your Halloween games. The Allip is an underused undead, and that's fair. They have so much potential, it would be a damn shame to just slap an encounter in willy-nilly. These spirits can be plot movers, mystery creators, mind-melters and more.

Continuing our Monster Month because elementals are monsters too! Elementals are very inspiring, but we find the details leave a lot to be desired from the perspectives of where do they live and what do they do? So, we figured out those answers for ourselves, and if you enjoy it, for your games too!