Wandering DMs Season 08

Dan and Paul celebrate Halloween with a look at two of fantasy gaming’s most enduring monsters: skeletons and zombies! What makes skeletons and zombies distinct as monsters? How have they evolved across editions of Dungeons & Dragons? What roles do they play in dungeon design, horror, and fantasy adventure? And how can a DM make even the most familiar undead frightening – or fun – again? Join us for a Halloween discussion of the undead classics: the rattling bones and walking corpses that just won’t stay buried.

Dan & Paul look back to our favorite covers in classic D&D modules. What makes for a great cover? How well do they balance the tension between showing the most exciting content versus giving away too much of the surprise? Do covers matter in the online streaming environment today?

Paul and Dan chat about Fatigue rules in D&D and other RPG’s. It was a key part of the Chainmail progenitor to D&D, and also an important mechanic in modern 5E rules. But it was absent or overlooked in classic rulesets like AD&D and B/X. Doesn’t movement and encumbrance make sense without it? Is it too exhausting to track? Or is there some better way?

Dan and Paul talk about mapping the dungeon: how does the DM communicate an unknown physical space to the players as they explore it? Do you describe the dungeon entirely through words and let the players build a map in their heads? Have one player draw the map as the DM describes each room and corridor? Sketch it out on a battle mat? Use a VTT? Or simply give the players a map and let them figure it out for themselves? Each approach creates its own challenges. How precise does the DM need to be? How much information should the players get? What happens when the players’ map doesn’t match the DM’s? And when one player becomes the designated mapper, how do we get the rest of the table engaged during exploration? We’ll talk about the practical techniques, tools, and table practices for communicating dungeon layouts, and how those choices affect the experience of the whole group.

Dan and Paul dive into the practical problem of keeping notes and records for long-running D&D campaigns. Paul is gearing up to run a new campaign in the same world and setting he’s been developing since 2010, which means digging back through nearly 15 years of old campaign notes, player-generated play reports, maps, and other records. What information is actually useful when you return to a setting years later? And what should we be recording now so that the next version of the campaign has a useful history to draw on? We’ll talk about the process as well as the technology: note-taking systems, three ring binders, wikis and databases, actual play reports, experiments we’ve tried over the years, what worked, what didn’t, and what we’ve learned about maintaining a campaign’s collective memory. If you’re running a campaign that’s been going for years – or hoping to make one that lasts that long – this is a look at how to keep its history from disappearing into a pile of forgotten notes.

Dan & Paul chat about level titles in early D&D. Did you know in the earliest editions of D&D (original, 1E, B/X), that every class level had a distinct title? You weren’t just a 4th-level fighter, you were officially a “Hero”. Were these titles diagetic (known by characters in-game), or were they purely a metagame tool for players? Did they have any effect on game play? And why did they disappear along with Gary Gygax in the 1980’s? The answers may surprise you!

With Dan still away on vacation, Paul is taking on a solo Dungeon Design Dash! Inspired by a suggestion from our Discord community, today’s challenge is to design an entire adventure built specifically for one Dungeon Master and one player. How does adventure design change when there’s only a single hero? What kinds of encounters, puzzles, and challenges work best? And can we build something fun and playable in just two hours? The goal is to create a complete one-on-one adventure that Paul can run for Dan in a future episode. Join us live as we brainstorm ideas, build the dungeon room by room, and see where inspiration takes us.

With Dan away traveling for the next two weeks, Paul is going solo… so what better time to play one of his favorite solo fantasy games ever? It’s Barbarian Prince! Barbarian Prince is a sprawling fantasy hexcrawl game published by Dwarfstar Games in 1981 and designed by Arnold Hendrick. This game has been a personal favorite of Paul’s for decades. It directly inspired his mobile game Road of Kings and continues to influence his current AI-powered RPG project, Hexcrawl. If you’ve ever wondered where his fascination with sandbox adventures, procedural encounters, and open-world fantasy comes from, this is the game that started it all. Longtime viewers may also recognize some similarities to Dan’s classic Outdoor Spoliation D&D adventure, which adapts the original Outdoor Survival board game into a tabletop hexcrawl. While the approach is different, both capture the spirit of exploring an unpredictable wilderness one hex at a time. Join Paul live as he explores the wilderness! He’ll be keeping an eye on chat throughout the adventure, taking your suggestions, answering questions about Barbarian Prince, solo gaming, and hexcrawl design, and talking about the ways this classic game has influenced his own projects over the years.

Dan and Paul discuss one of D&D’s most iconic and surprisingly complicated—spells: Invisibility. On the surface it seems straightforward, but once players start dropping items, picking up treasure, attacking, casting spells, or sneaking around a dungeon, the questions begin. What can it be cast on? What breaks the spell? How should a DM rule on all the gray areas that the rules leave open? We’ll also explore classic magic items like Rings of Invisibility and Elven Cloaks, discuss how different editions have approached invisibility, and share practical tips for tracking invisible creatures at the table without ruining the mystery. Whether you’re a player looking to pull off the perfect infiltration or a DM trying to adjudicate invisible shenanigans fairly, join us as we make the unseen a little easier to see.

Paul and Dan look back to our marathon holiday weekend playthrough of the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, the classic D&D tournament adventure that first appeared 50 years ago! Does the module still stand up today for modern players? What lessons or surprises would we take from our actual-play experience? What’s the grade on how well Dan ran this elder adventure from the canon of Gygax?