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Our Land of Azurth 5e game concluded last night with our heroes facing down a shadow creature of immense size. Every bite attack it made threatened to swallow one of the party, and it periodically emitted bursts of necrotic energy. Luckily, they have Dagmar to keep throwing out the healing and two energy weapons they obtained long ago from visitors from the future (or perhaps past?). Erekose drained his energy rifle attacking the creature and was forced to go back to his sword. Ultimately, they destroyed the monster, but it went out in a blast of negative energy.

Dagmar checked on the emaciated form of the Wizard. He was alive but barely and not saying anything useful. Waylon tried shooting the black, anti-glowing orb over head with his energy pistol. The blasts seemed to burn it, but it didn't take it long to heal. 

A group of Gloom Elf priests in tall hats emerged from the shadows (naturally!). They didn't attack but suggested the party's actions were futile. The Anti-Sun was already beginning to manifest in this world. It had provided the power that allowed the Wizard to manifest a giant shadow to fight the machine of the rebels, though the effort had drained him. They did not care. The Anti-Sun was here!

The party's response was to attack them. In a few rounds, they had killed the elven priests, but the avatar of the Anti-Sun was still hung above their heads. Luckily, they remembered (with a hint from the DM!) that they had previously defeated a shadow dragon by overloading one of the energy weapons. They did so again, and the resultant explosion put a ragged hole in the black sphere. Dagmar gave her all into a blast of radiant energy that finished it off, closing the portal.

The party heard noises in the chamber outside and prepared for another fight, but it turned out to be the soldiers of the rebellion led by Queen Desira of Virid and Warrior Princess Bellona of Sang. They related that once the giant shadow of the Wizard was defeated, and the Gloom Elves mysteriously withdrew, the city fell quickly. Their forces were just mopping up. 

The party debated saving the dying Wizard but ultimately decided to let him die rather than risk it.

The princesses suggest the party return to the camp and get some food and rest. They do, and the first person they know they run into is Kory Keenstep. He talks circumspectly about a trip back in time that he chose not to take, but his sone Kully did. When queried further, he suggests the party talk to the Clockwork Princess, Viola.

The party finds her in the command tent. She reveals that defeating the Wizard might have likely led to the destruction of Azurth, as his existence constituted a causal loop around it. The only way to protect against that was to stabilize Azurth's history.

Instead of using a children's story to serve the evil ambition of one man, Azurth needed a new story to sustain it. So, the princesses sent back a storyteller, Kully the bard, to tell the faeries, the proto-goddesses of Azurth, a new story. One not subverted by the wizard.

The world would reset in about 14 hours.

The party asked if they would remember. Viola said she wasn't certain. Possibly they would since they had been to the beginning of Azurth themselves. They'll just have to find out.

The following morning, the party awakened in their residence, the former Dove Inn in Rivertown. There were no signs of war or occupation anywhere. The statue in the town square is not of their rivals the Eccentrics, but of them.

The End

The Masters of Mayhem are:

Dagmar ...... AndreaErekose .......... BobShade ........... GinaWaylon .......... TugZabra ......... Kathy
previous members:
Kairon ........... EricBellmorae ...... Haigenand Kully Keenstep ...... Jim

Jason and I are still working on our 2-page comic for the first issue of the Swords Against! Sword & Sorcery anthology. Jason sent me the inked first page so I could start laying out the lettering, and that's what the images here are from, though there is a still some clean-up and shadowing to come on the art.

This is how it starts with the barbarian Karkath:

And this is how it ends for him:

Dawn Patrol

Gary Con 2026 started today, but I am still traveling there, so here's the final installment of my report from last year.

This post covers Saturday, March 22 and Sunday March 23, 2025.

The previous days can be found here: Day 0 (Wed) - Day 1 (Thur) - Day 2 (Fri)

(1) Learn to Play Dawn Patrol (Snoopy vs The Red Baron) run by Skip Williams

My first game on Saturday was TSR's Dawn Patrol, designed by Mike Carr, who also wrote the first module for Basic D&D, B1 In Search of the Unknown. Mike still runs games at Gary Con, but this game was referreed by a different TSR alumnus, Skip Williams. I owned a copy of Dawn Patrol back in the 80s, but never actually played it, which is why I signed up for this introductory scenario, which pitted "Snoopy" Sopwith Camels versus "Red Baron" Fokker DRs.

Convention event listing description:

"Dawn patrol on Saturday morning is a Gary Con tradition. Did you know that Dawn Patrol (then called Fight in the Skies or F.I.T.S.) was the first event ever to run at Gen Con? (Now you do.). Become a legend! Join us! The scenario features Iconic aircraft: Sopwith Camels vs. Fokker DR Is."

Photos:

Skip Williams (standing center) reffing

(2) Planet of the Mists run by Chris Hunt

This was another first for me, playing WEG's classic d6 Star Wars for the first time. The scenario was a WEG module, Planet of the Mists, using a minis and a cardboard scenery setup that made for cinematic melee scenes. I got to be a Wookie and cause some mayhem as we escaped from an Imperial prison.

Convention event listing description:

"A band of unlikely allies is imprisoned on a world the star charts say doesn't exist and caught in a desperate struggle to save the Galaxy from the Empire! A Rebel agent, cynical slicer, brash smuggler, savage wookiee, Imperial expat, or fallen Jedi. Which will you be? Thwart the Empire’s evil plan and escape the Planet of the Mists. This Star Wars RPG adventure by West End Games is for all ages."

(3) The Future King run by Demos Sahlas

Another game run by Demos of the OSR Grimoire (see Day, Game 1 for the first), this is a very obscure adventure written and self-published by Tom Moldvay of B/X Basic fame after he had left TSR, one of his last RPG adventures. As can be seen in the event description below, this is a League of Extraordinary Gentleman-type scenario (before that even existed) where each played a historical figure from a different era and place. I'd known about this adventure for years, but never thought I'd get to play in it. An epic and poetic adventure, perfect for my last evening this year at Gary Con.

Cover image from
 Wayne's Books

Convention event listing description:

"Six historical figures: Doc Holliday, Nostradamus, Bruce Lee, Harald Hardraada, Owen Glendower, and Cyrano de Bergerac have been gathered together out of the mists of time. Their mission is to find and wake King Arthur, for it is time that he again don the mantle of kingship. A unique small-press role-playing adventure by the late, great Tom Moldvay, published in 1985."

I didn't take any photos during this game, which was mostly played theatre-of-the-mind.

Sunday 

(4) G.I. JOE: Race To Reality

For my last morning at Gary Con, I played in a GI Joe vs Cobra two-sided game. This was another minis heavy game, and they GMs also provided us with lots of fancy swag. I got to play Snake Eyes, my favorite character from the 80s cartoon.

Convention event listing description:

"Who will be the victor in the race to find the Ancient Artifact that brings your thoughts to reality. Help the Joe's or Cobra out, and be the first to find the artifact. Characters provided to save time."

Photos: 

That's it for Gary Con 2025 ... onward to 2026!

P.S. Spotted Cow, by local WI brewery Spotted Cow, is a perennial Gary Con favorite, and now I know you can buy it at the Milwaukee airport to bring home!

Traveller, the Most Influential Science Fiction RPG of All Time, is Coming to 5E

A landmark conversion brings nearly five decades of iconic science-fiction roleplaying to the world’s most popular tabletop system.

Traveller, first published in 1977, is officially being adapted in a new project led by veteran game designer Timothy Brown, in full coordination with Mongoose Publishing. The project aims to bring the depth, scope, and creative freedom of classic Traveller to a new generation of players.

Designed for groups interested in science-fiction storytelling using familiar tabletop mechanics, Traveller 5E preserves what made the original game legendary while making it accessible to a wider audience. The result is a complete science fiction roleplaying experience centered on interstellar travel, trade, jump space starships, and sector-level worldbuilding, allowing groups to create entire universes on their own.

“This 5E version introduces Traveller to an enormous new audience. Starships, strange worlds, exotic alien creatures … every aspect of the sci-fi classic is faithfully recreated using the new edition’s rules. Will the existing Imperium and all its sourcebooks be updated to the new rules? If there’s demand for that, then yes, of course, but the primary objective is to make a sandbox game that feeds the pent-up demand for whole new game universes. Equally exciting, we’re tracking some of our favorite sci-fi novels and series to license as whole new Traveller 5E settings … stay tuned!” – Timothy Brown

Traveller 5E supports a wide range of play styles and science-fiction themes, offering tools for:

? Iconic character creation

? Designing original worlds, sectors, and interstellar settings

? Building starships, vehicles, and alien creatures

? Campaign play focused on exploration, commerce, and discovery

The crowdfunding campaign for Traveller 5E will launch on March 31.

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About World’s Largest RPGs

World’s Largest RPGs is a tabletop roleplaying game publisher focused on bringing legendary games to modern audiences. The company works closely with creators and licensors to deliver excellent roleplaying experiences for players and game masters alike.

About Mongoose Publishing

Mongoose Publishing is a British manufacturer of roleplaying games, miniatures, and card games, publishing material since 2001. Its product lines include Traveller, Paranoia, 2300AD, and Shield Maidens.

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I'm reading DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at comics that were published on February 21, 1985.

Batman and the Outsiders #22: Alan Davis makes his American comics debut taking over on art from Aparo. As the Outsiders arrive in the ruin of the JLA satellite, this issue feels very modern (or at least very early 21st century) in its portrayal of a very driven Batman with secret plans to make up for what he perceives as his JLA teammates' shortcomings and his tendency to view his new teammates as instruments to use toward his goals. The team has brought Dr. Jace with them to use the JLA's special equipment to help them learn more about Halo's origins. Examining her brainwaves, they awaken her hidden self and discover she is an aurakle, one of a group of sentient energy beings that have existed since the before the universe. The aurakle that became Halo had been fascinated with organic beings and inhabited the body of Violet Harper after her death.
At first, the Outsiders are sort of skeptical about Halo's story, but after a group of aurakles arrive to force her to re-merge with their "unity", they can't doubt it. At first the Outsiders hold their own against the energy beings, but the aurakles blow a hole in the station and take Halo away. Several of the Outsiders and sucked into space, but Geo-Force saves them and Metamorpho seals the breach.

Blue Devil #12: Under the demonic influence of his trident, Blue Devil goes on a bit of a rampage but given the tone of this book it's played a bit for laughs with his maniacal statements being mostly movie industry cliches. Green Lantern tries to stop him, but well, fire can be yellow...so they have to call in Zatana. She gets to the bottom of what's going on, and as they free his trident from its demonic possessor, Etrigan shows up and attacks, not knowing Dan is cured. They soon straighten things out, though, and Etrigan leaves. The Demon is miscolored this whole issue so that he looks like he's shirtless but still has red frilly cuffs.

Green Lantern #189: John Stewart and Katma Tui combat Sonar and his new super-powered cronies, Throttle and Blindside. Meanwhile, Hal and Carol investigate the identity of the Predator, but so far, they haven't found anything substantive. Hal also pays a visit to Guy Gardner in the facility where he lives, having suffered brain damage. He intends to pay more frequent visits as he fills a kinship with this other former Lantern.
In the "Tales of the Green Lantern Corps" backup by Klein and O'Neill, Xax, the insectoid Green Lantern of Xaos, tried to feed the hungry masses, but his ring wasn't up to keeping up with the demand. He tries his best to prevent a war between clans fighting over the harvest. The Spider Guild invades and wraps the Xaosians in cocoons. Xax saves some of his fellows while confronting guild machines, but he falls into a yellow metal trap.

Infinity, Inc. #15: The Chroma story arc (if we can call it that) concludes this issue. Mostly, the story is about the disagreement among the Infinitors with Obsidian frustrated the others still seem to be fascinated with the alien and are blind to the threat he poses. Backing up Obsidian's intuitions is the crowd building ominously outside the hospital where Chroma is recovering and the other Infinitors sort of baseless but persistent feelings of his beneficence. This all comes down to a short fight between them at the hospital before Chroma just decides humanity isn't ready for him yet and leaves. It seems Thomas is going for the sort of comic-book-profound, cosmic story of his days at Marvel, but this just doesn't reach the level of bombast to pull that off. McFarlane's layouts are much more conventional this issue with better use of space, and the stylistic flourishes he will later be known for are either embryonic or being tamped down by DeZuniga's inks.

New Teen Titans #9: I read this issue in 1986 when it was reprinted in Tales of the Teen Titans #68. Wolfman and García-López/Tanghal continue the story from last issue. The Teen Titans rally the Titans of myth to carry the battle against Thia to Olympus. The first encounter Kole who Thia made imprison the Amazons with her crystal powers. The freed Amazons are able to join the fight, which is good because Thia sends the monstrous Typhon against our heroes. Ultimately, Hyperion sacrifices himself to destroy his wife, though two consumed together in flames. The Titan team defeats Typhon, and Lilith is reunited with the winged alien. In the aftermath, a grateful Zeus decrees that the surviving Titans of myth, and Lilith, now recognized as a demi-goddess, may remain in Olympus.

Sgt. Rock #401: The first story is one of the oddest of Kanigher's works on this title. Easy company see's a meteor coming streaking across the sky, then encounters the large meteorite stuck in the ground. Then it seems to sort of follow them, showing up when they encounter a group of refugees and share food, then again in the stream near a bombed-out village, where Rock referees a confrontation between a lone German soldier and French locals, both only children. The mysterious visitor, drawing conclusions about the contradictory nature of humanity, leaves again for the cosmos.
The next story by Joe Kubert is about a German corporal who basically becomes an avatar of death in guilt over being the sole survivor of his squad is a reprint from Weird War Tales #1. The final story by Arata and the Kubert brothers tells the story of a boy who played with toy tanks designed the resemble those of World War II, but finds his own interactions with military vehicles in Vietnam less enjoyable.

Saga of Swamp Thing #37: Moore and Veitch/Totleben introduce John Constantine, who is a mysterious world traveler on a mission to combat the coming of some malevolent entity. Constantine shows up in Louisiana where Swamp Thing, tended by Abbie, is still trying to regrow his body. Constantine taunts him with knowledge about the swamp thing's capabilities and purpose and challenges him to meet him in a town named Rosewood outside of Chicago in a week. Swamp Thing accepts the challenge, musing that the name "Rosewood" seems familiar to him. We're also told in passing by Abbie that Nukeface is "probably dead," so that's that, I guess.

Talent Showcase #17: We get the ending of Collapsar's storyline by Tillman and Woch, and it involves him bringing together two factions on the alien world he wound up on. Sort of anticlimatic, really. 
The other two stories are sort of action stories (one kind of spy-fi) written by Rowlands. They both demonstrate a feel for story structure and breakdowns that is definitely a cut above what we generally get in this title. Some credit for this may well be due to the artists, too: Grindberg on the spy story and Ron Wagner on the action one, both of whom would have long penciling careers for various publishers mostly not on superhero books. Unfortunately, neither of the stories are very good overall.

Warlord #94: I reviewed this issue here.

Who's Who #4: This is the Cs so there are a lot of Captains here. We get the recently acquired Charlton character Captain Atom making his DC debut. His first in-story appearance will be Crisis #6. Interestingly, his alter ego is given as Nathaniel Adams in a retcon. Captain Carrot is here, too, showing Earth-C isn't forgotten, nor is Earth-S with Captain Marvel and Captain Marvel, Jr. present. The cool but obscure adventure character Captain Fear is featured in his Simonson rendition. We last saw him in Unknown Soldier #256 back in 1981. Cheshire from NTT is here, as is that Forgotten Hero, Cave Carson. A half-page Chlorophyll Kid entry is a harbinger of a rising profile for the Legion Subs. The standout illustration this issue, though, has got to be Dave Stevens' Catwoman I.

 A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned a new setting I was thinking about for after my current Land of Azurth game comes to an end. I now think I will call it Parsulan (or at least I will for the moment!) borrowing a name coined by a friend of mine for a setting we co-created back in the 2e area. I think Parsulan will be the name of the continent this campaign is focused on. I recycle some other names from that old setting, as well, in homage.

So in addition to the aspects I mentioned before, this is what I think Parsulan will be like:

Post-apocalyptic. Having been overrun by demonic forces (true demons and their allies) several centuries ago, the magitech-employing civilization that existed prior was reduced to "points of light." There are still in typical D&D and fantasy fiction standing, city-states isolated by sparsely populated wilderness.

Absent gods. The gods, at least the major ones, have forsaken the world and retreated into the Overworld. Clerics preserve the civic rituals practiced in the days of old and try to keep the old beliefs alive, hoping that the gods will return if humanity shows sufficient humility and piety.

Adventures Guild. It's a common concept in Japanese Standard Fantasy worlds, but as I envision it, it's has much more of a Jianghu element than the very modern employment agency/professional organization of so many anime, though it will likely have elements of that--as well as being a burial society.

Dungeon Zones. Inspired by the rpg Sword World 2.5's "shallow Abysses," I think there will be eruptions/excrescences of the Demon Realm maybe called "shadow cysts" which will engulf and distort areas of the land, leading into places of altered reality and danger. These form around a nidus called a seed or heart. Only neutralization of this heart will cause of rupture and ultimately dissipation of the cyst.

I originally posted these in 2016...
These are model sheets for the Sectaurs cartoon. The items depicted here should had a little post-apocalyptic strangeness to any treasure haul:







Find more here.

It may surprise you, or perhaps horrify you, that I am a massive fan of musical theater. I grew up listening to musicals with my uncle Chechin (his real name is José Agustín, but Chechin is his nickname). I still remember watching A Chorus Line at the Centro de Bellas Artes de Puerto Rico in the early 80s, and Nine was probably the first musical I knew all the lyrics to by heart.

While I love many different shows, none has inspired me more than Les Misérables.

I know it is long and melodramatic, but it is also undeniably a powerful, grand spectacle that speaks directly to humanity’s struggles. The Les Misérables: Complete Symphonic Recording has easily been the soundtrack I’ve listened to the most while writing about TTRPGs. In fact, I am listening to it right now as I write this post!

I will admit I have NEVER actually read Victor Hugo’s original novel. Every few years, I tell myself I will, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. So, what fascinates me so much about the musical? It’s the struggle of the oppressed, the sweeping narrative, and the intense ideological conflict between the protagonist, Jean Valjean, and his antagonist, Javert.

Whenever I think about alignment in D&D, I almost always frame it in terms of these characters. If you search online, you’ll see I’m not the only one doing this! While I don’t agree with every single classification in the usual alignment memes floating around out there, it’s clear this is a shared touchstone for many gamers.

For instance, I don’t think Valjean is Lawful Good; I’ve always viewed him as more Neutral Good. As a teen, I thought Javert was the ultimate example of the unyielding, intransigent Paladin, but looking back, he obviously isn’t Lawful Good. I wouldn’t quite say he is Lawful Evil, either. To me, he is the absolute embodiment of Lawful Neutral.

I have even incorporated the musical’s lyrics directly into my games. In one campaign, I used a modified version of the lyrics to the song Stars to serve as a Paladin’s Oath.

I have also pulled bits and pieces from Red and Black and Empty Chairs at Empty Tables—I even played the latter in the background during a particularly poignant session.

Those last two clips are from the 2012 movie. I still prefer the Complete Symphonic Recording I mentioned above, but if you are curious to see it, I highly recommend the film!

See? Not all TTRPG inspiration must come from novels or movies! What non-traditional sources inspire your games?

Bonus Inspiration! As a final treat, here is something perfect for your Ravenloft games: Total Eclipse of the Heart from Dance of the Vampires.

In German:

In English:

Welcome back to Part 2. In the previous post, I focused on how my life as a gamer blossomed over this decade, expanding from TTRPGs being a hobby I enjoyed with my close friends at home to stepping out into the larger gaming community—locally and online—and into a wider world. For this very reason, over those 10 years, I played TTRPGs with more people than I had before, or since.

These were the years of Geeknics and convention games. I can’t recall how many people I played with at those. I also played games at Gen Con with strangers and with old friends. I particularly remember playing a Psi*Run demo (one of my favorite pick-up games to this day!), and the Savage Worlds game David A. Miller ran for my friends, where the system first truly clicked for me! You can read about Gen Con 2011 and the friends I met there in this post from back then.

From left to right: David A Miller, PJ Deyo, Gaby and Yamir playing Savage Worlds, Gen Con 2011.

That energy eventually carried over into other local projects. Desde la Fosa was a smaller group where I made new friends and played with old ones, with whom I had never rolled dice before. For a while, Desde la Fosa was my second gaming group, and I had never had two regular groups running simultaneously before. The aftermath of Hurricane María eventually broke us up. We played a few times after—no streaming, just gaming—but it fizzled away. I am still in touch with AJ, Felipe, and José, the core team that started the project, even though two of them have moved off the island. José is currently a regular player in my weekly campaign. But near or far, they are family.

From left to right: AJ, Felipe, and José Garcia. The Desde La Fosa crew playing at TheGaming Pit.

As this post focuses more on my regular gaming group, the closer, more intimate group of friends I sit with every week to play games, it is important to talk about family. Not wanting to sound too much like Dominic Toretto of Fast & Furious fame, the players at my table are, in many ways, my family. The family we choose. Close friends who are more than gaming buddies; they are an important part of my life.

So, who were these people? What did I play and who did I game with from 2007 to 2017?

The Hideout of the Mequetrefes (Again)

In 2007, I was running my weekly homebrewed campaign at Sammy’s house. Since Sammy had a dedicated game room, and I could not say no to someone who wanted to play, the number of players ballooned from six to nine at one point. I wish I had pictures of the group playing there.

The Histrionic GM! (Circa 2007)

José Fernando, Piwie, Karlo, Luis Alvardo, Luis Lao, Pierre, and Victor were the original players. Sammy and Carly eventually joined the campaign. It lasted over two years, so there was some ebb and flow in the player roster. Victor did not finish the campaign; Pierre and José, I think, were absent for some time, but at the final session, we had eight players at the table.

Sadly, as the campaign ended, Sammy and I had a falling out. We had very different personalities and senses of humor, as well as different boundaries around family outside the game. Sammy would relentlessly make fun of everyone, and I was not willing to have people in my life who were not part of the game made to feel uncomfortable. So, I packed my things and moved on.

This was very hard. Sammy was a close friend, but we could not reach an agreement, which created a schism. We remained friends, and I’d like to think we mended fences. We played on occasions two or three times more over the years, but we saw far less of each other. When he passed, he left a void that continues to be felt to this day.

I was planning a Star Wars Saga Edition game with some of the other players at Sammy’s house, including Tato and Peter, with whom I had traveled to Gen Con. Sadly, this was not to be.

Back Home

We had not played in my apartment since 1999. I cleaned up the guest room and turned it into a sort of game room. This change splintered the group. Sammy, Carly, and Piwie no longer played with us. Other players emigrated, but one rejoined: Guaro returned to playing with us. For the first time in a long time, my core group of players was only five people: Guaro, José Fernando, Luis Alvarado, Luis Lao, and Pierre.

We played Star Wars Saga Edition, which was a LOT of fun. I wrote a series of posts about the game’s setting a while ago. You can find the first one here. Regardless of the split, the group slowly but surely began to grow again.

D&D 4th Edition and More

When D&D 4th Edition came out, we were alternating gaming locations, sometimes playing at Guaro’s house. His mother had dementia, and if he could not find someone to look after her, we’d play at his place. If memory serves, we played the first session of my Points of Light campaign, the Tenedal Valley, at his house.

Clockwise, from top left to bottom left: Guaro, Luis Lao, José Fernando, Pierre, playing at Guaro’s house.

Our group might not have loved the 4th Edition, but it grew. Fernando and Raul began playing with us. Raul would come and go, but Fernando has been a mainstay in the group since 2008. Also, the first player I met through Puerto Rico Role Players, Yamir, joined the group!

From left to right: Fernando, Raul, and Yamir

This was a wonderful time. Not only did we play D&D 4e for about 7 months, but we also played a secret TORG prequel using d20 Modern (I never told them it was a prequel to that game!). I was a player in Pierre’s d20 Modern Zombie game and Luis Lao’s Mutants & Masterminds game.

By 2009, things were changing again. I met my wife, and we moved in together. I gave up playing other games and settled back into my one-gaming-night-a-week routine. We were still playing in my apartment; we gave up on 4th Edition and began playing Pathfinder 1st edition with the Playtest rules.

This was the beginning of a long-running pirate-themed campaign that ran from 2009 to 2014.

Pirates and Lairs

The Jade Island campaign was the 6th campaign set in the current version of my long-running homebrewed world, created in 1987. In many ways, the weekly group meeting to play every Tuesday in 2026 coalesced in this campaign. Many players had been part of the regular gaming group before, but the current core of players really came together here. Of the current regular six players, four were part of this campaign.

Guaro had made a character to play with us, but he was a no-show when the campaign began. Sadly, we lost contact with him around 2010.

From left to right: Luis Lao, Luis Alvarado, Fernan, Pierre, Yamir, José Fernando, Carlos, and Luis Lao

Fernando, José Fernando, Luis Alvarado, Luis Lao, Pierre, and Yamir were the original players. Not long after, Carlos joined the group. I have known Carlos since the 90s, but he had never sat down to play with us. He originally played as a guest character and quickly joined as a regular player.

Yamir moved to the mainland US but joined a short-lived play-by-post version of the same campaign. He played only a few years with us, but his creativity and his character became part of the lore and history of the world. The play-by-post included friends from Puerto Rico Role Players, old gaming buddies from the 90s, and Sara, who would eventually transition from the virtual game to the regular in-person group.

By this time, the game had moved from my apartment to Fernan’s house. We were not the only gaming group playing there, and we affectionately called his house The Lair!

Playing Wanderers of the Outlands

There, we played the Jade Islands campaign, a Mutants & Masterminds campaign as an interlude between the two halves of the pirate campaign, and when that ended in 2014, our first long Savage Worlds campaign: the Wanderers of the Outlands, which ran from 2014 to 2016. I wrote a series of posts about that campaign on this blog; you can read the first here.

Some friends stepped away from the group and have not played with us since. Luis Alvarado left during the Mutants & Masterminds game. Pierre also stopped playing; real-life responsibilities kept him busy. He is currently in the US, and we text every day. They are both well, but we still miss them at the table!

From left to right: Sara, Edgardo, Mariana, and Hector

Other long-term friends came to sit at the table. Hector is another longtime friend who only sat to play with us years after we met. Our youngest players, Mariana and Edgardo, who we met through Puerto Rico Role Players, also joined our game, bringing in new blood, new ideas, and new friends to the table.

New Editions and Disasters (these two things are NOT related)

After D&D 5th Edition came out, we began a campaign using the system in 2016. The usual suspects were at the table: Carlos, Edgardo, Fernando, Hector, José Fernando, Luis Lao, Mariana, Sara, and Fernando’s wife, Naida. Richard, another friend met through Puerto Rico Role Players, joined when Sara and Hector had bowed out.

From left to right: Fernando, Naida, and Richard

In 2016, Tony, another legend in the TTRPG scene in Puerto Rico, visited from the mainland, and we had a get-together dubbed Tony Con at Jaime and Carmen’s house, where dead friends met via Puerto Rico Role Players. We played D&D 5th edition, which Tony still doesn’t like, being the Pathfinder diehard, he is! Along with Tony José Fernando, Tato, Angel, Luis Alvarado, and Sammy played that day. This was not the last time I played with Sammy, that would be in 2017 at The Gaming Pit, but it felt like a reunion with long-lost friends.

From left to right: Tato, José Fernando, Ángel, Sammy, Luis Alvarado, and Tony the Magnificent!

Also in 2016, I celebrated my 30 years as a gamer (like I am doing now at the 40-year mark!) with a game at Carlos Steffens’ house, where we played the D&D Mentzer Red Box adventure using The Black Hack rules. My TTRPG community organizing and my private enjoyment of the game had met, and this was a great time of gaming in my life.

2016, celebrating 30 Years a Gamer!

Throughout all these years, we had friends who visited and played guest characters, like PJ Deyo and Luis Miranda, who played in the pirate campaign (Luis came back for the 5th edition campaign as well). Javi Vidal joined us briefly for the campaign but had to move on shortly after. Mariana and Edgardo moved to the other side of the island and would connect to the game online to play with us.

Clockwise from top left to bottom left: Luis Miranda, Carlos, PJ Deyo, and Edgardo & Mariana playing remotely.

Despite the changes and new players, we had left behind the growing pains of a new system and finally found our game’s stride. I was really enjoying the campaign and playing a bi-weekly game at The Gaming Pit with the Desde la Fosa crew. What could go wrong?

Well, Hurricane Maria arrived in 2017. But that’s a topic for the next period in my 40 years as a gamer.

Final Thoughts

Despite the grim closing of this decade of gaming, the changes that María and other disasters would cause in Puerto Rico and in my life, this was a magical decade of growth, expanding circles of friends, and a wonderful feeling of community that continues to this day.

I am lucky this way. I started gaming with friends, and then the people I met through the TTRPG hobby became close friends—my extended family. I am grateful for each one of them. Thanks for being part of my life.

The Stats (2007-2017)

• Total Campaigns: 9
• Years Active: 30 (Consecutive play from 1986 to 2006)
• MVP Systems: D&D 3.5, 4th and 5th editions, Pathfinder, Mutants & Masterminds, and Savage Worlds

What about you? How has your gaming group evolved over the years, and have the people at your table become your chosen family, too? I’d love to hear your stories in the comments!

By Andreas Wille
Medora Games
OSR
Levels 1-2

A village deep within the steaming marshlands is experiencing strange phenomena. More and more villagers rise from their beds at night in a mindless stupor, wandering out into the bog never to be seen again. The desperate villagers have promised a great reward to anyone who can find their loved ones and stop whatever dark magick stole them away.

This eight page adventure uses three pages to present six rooms inside of a small dugout/ruined basement. It is trying to do the right things, generally, but confuses form over function, resulting in a muddled mess of rooms in which you generally just stab things.

My complaints here seem familiar to me. Which must mean that I have reviewed this publisher/designer before and then picked something else out to give them another chance and see if the issues I had were a trend or a fluke. And then forgot what I was doing when I rolled back around a couple of weeks later and ended up thinking “wow, this seems familiar.”

Only three of the five pages are actually used for the adventure. Meaning that all of that effort from the other five pages could have reasonably been put in the actual dungeon instead of the support material for the dungeon. THE ADVENTURE IS THE MAIN THING. Spend your fucking effort on the actual adventure. THEN, after you have created a masterpiece, you can add in some support material. 

At the start of each room is a little sentence of two in italics. Is it read-aloud? Is it a room summary? Fuck if I know. Sometimes it seems like read-aloud and sometimes it reads like a room summary for the DM. “You spy a ruined tower behind a curtain of willow leaves, naught

more than a collection of crumbling stone walls.” That seems like read-aloud, right? I mean, it’s in italics and thats shity and it’s in second person and that’s shitty and it’s got that folksy shit and that’s shitty. But, it seems like read-aloud? But then in other places it seems more like a DM room summary? “Behind the gate, a long rectangular room holds a pool of thick,

oozing mud in the middle.” If the room had people screaming in it, or was brightly lit with a broadway show going on, or had an obvious huge ancient red dragon in it then that little summary section would not tell you. But it seems like in read-aloud it should? So … I’m confused. What the fuck is the point of the the italics text that kicks off every encounter/location? I don’t get it. Not read-aloud. Not a DM summary. I don’t know, REALLY bad read aloud?

Because, again, there can be a shit load going on in the room that the read-aloud/summary text just does NOT cover. The description up there is just fucking weird.

After that comes a lit of bullets. Yes, this is the “we use bullets for everything” kind of adventure formatting. That’s not necessarily a good thing and does NOT always lead to better idea presentation. Anything, used too much, becomes cover. If everything is a bullet then nothing is, right? And therefore nothing is emphasized for presentation to the DM? The same with the bolding that occurs INSIDE each bullet. It’s not that all information needs to be bulleted and each noun or whatever in each bullet needs bolded. The use of formatting is for emphasizing and highlighting, calling out to the DM certain things that are important or that they may need to find quickly or something like that. “Hey, this thing here is more important than some of the rest so pay attention to it. “ And you can’t do that if you use the techniques for EVERYTHING. 

The random tables here are weird. Here’s a six entry random table on alternate names for swamp. Fen, mire, bog, etc. Why do that? Why not just present the data if you want to do that? There are, I don’t know, half a dozen of these sorts of tables taking up space. A waste of space, IMO, And in other places, like the wandering table, the entries are doing something. Yeah! But it’s so mundane that they might as well not be. “Crocodiles, laying in wait,” Ok … “Carcass crawler, digesting its last meal.” Sure. There’s no specificity there. A body half sticking out if its mouth? Ok, I’m down with that. “Laying in wait.” B O R I N G. What put it in at all?Bt, then, in a work of genius, on the map page there’s a little three-entry table for “who is held prisoner. “ Things like “pox-riddled peasant sobbing quietly.” ey! Great! War veteran missing limbs. Great! Thief trying to pick the lock. Great! Each has specificity. And that makes them worth putting in. Likewise the “random gore” table on the same page is great. It’s like those two tables were done by someone else because they are the only two that really stand out as interesting and actually adding value to the adventure. 

“Once a watchtower used to survey the area, time and weather have left it in ruins.” That’s one o the bulleted items in the DM text. Background. Telling us what once was. And the adventure is full of this. The entries are full of nonsense. “How to make an entry seem long but not actually add any value” Window dressing effects. “It glows blue” Backstory. “Once a watchtower used to survey the area, time and weather have left it in ruins.” Shit like that. But, ultimately, all you do in the rooms is stab something. As one would expect, I guess, in a six room adventure. “I remember a time in America when an eight page adventure contained the Steading of the Hill Giant chief, with two dungeon levels and a gazillion rooms that made sense together!”  Nostalgia is a terrible thing. We remember Steading, one of the best adventures ever from many standpoints, but forget the hundreds of shitpiles that existed also. There have always been shitty adventures and this is just the latest version of them.

I did, however, find this HILARIOUS. “Thelich cast a ritual to reach out into weak-willed minds nearby.” Yeah yeah, there’s a lich, a weak one, and it’s summoning weak willed people to its lair to like suck the life out of them. (Hey baby …) But, then, also in the hooks section: “A random party member begins hearing the lich’s call and is driven towards its lair.” BURN! Your character is weak-willed!  Suck it Galdalf! 

This is $1.50 at DriveThru. There’s no pREEEEEVIIIEEEEWWWWW! You gotta put in a preview man, so we can tell if we want to buy it or not. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/555050/the-lair-of-the-bog-lich?1892600

By Christopher Wilson
Self Published
OSE
Levels 1-6

For over a thousand generations, the sorcerer kings of Varkooth held the valley between the Schelus Mountains and the Gray Hills in an iron fist, until the War of the Heavens saw their mighty fortress sink into the very earth. Now, nearly 1,600 years later, that fortress has once more been discovered. Can a group of adventurers stop the evil contained within from spreading once more?

This 103 page adventure uses about forty pages to describe an overland journey and five levels of a dungeon with about a hundred rooms. It is essentially a minimalistic hack expanded to a hundred pages with meaningless trivia and padding. More so than usual.

Characters opening the door should make a Wisdom Attribute check. If they fail then a butterfly flaps its wings in China.

Two weeks away is a dungeon that some archeologists have found, a fabled site. They encountered some trouble and thus the party is hired to come clean the place out for them. You travel overland for two weeks entering many mundane towns and villages (the first forty or so pages), and then explore the five level dungeon where you stab things (the last forty or so pages.) 

I found a few things interesting here. On the journey you may encounter some rangers. They are framed as, perhaps, game wardens who fine or arrest the party if they have been hunting in the area. That’s kind of an interesting framing for rangers. A little out of place given the monsters running around. Maybe they have better things to do given what’s going on? No? You’re gonna write me a ticket anyway? Sure. But, still, nice low fantasy idea. It also puts the monsters on the map with brief notations, great for a DM judging reactions from the next room, and in one place explicitly tells us that the party can hear chanting from behind a closed door. Again, related to the monsters on the map, the dungeon room does not exist in a vacuum, and helping the DM describe what the party senses up ahead is a great then in an appropriate environment.

I feel like this adventure is a textbook example of how to expand an entry without adding any value to it. The result ends up being overly long and obfuscates any meaningful data in the description. We can start right off with a wandering monster table. Here’s the entry for Raiders: “Raiders: Regardless of which kingdom one may find themselves in, there are always those that wish to cause strife. In the Border Lands, raiders are usually from the Kingdom of Beiria, though they make sure to wear no livery.” We have started with “Raiders” and then went on to define what a raider is, “Regardless of which kingdom one may find themselves in, there are always those that wish to cause strife” Yup, that’s what the word raider can mean. Noting the cross-border issue and lack of livery is good, but it would be even better if this were meaningful to the adventure. It is not. There are no cross-border tensions in this. Or, how about a wild boar? “Wild boars are a frequent site in the forests and fields of the Border Lands and the Glaustian Empire. They are frequently hunted by villagers and farmers, though they can prove to be dangerous prey. Wild boars tend to be aggressive and territorial, being encountered in groups of 3d4.” So, 4d4 aggressive and territorial wild boars, with a lead in telling us what a wild boar is. 

It also engages in explaining the mundane. You pass through a non-trivial number of towns and villages on your way to the dungeon, with each being described over several pages. Each. You want to know what a Fishmongers market looks like? It’s in here. It has no relation to the adventure, other than being a place  in the town, but it’s here. No? How about spending a decent sized paragraph describing what an outlying farm is and how they sell their excess on market days and how they pay their taxes? Again, this is just some rando shit in a town along the way. I did mention “text book example” didn’t I? Of adding words but no value? These things are common in this adventure. 

And then there’s the trivia. Imagine if you constructed a room via the DMG1e tables. You rolled for monsters and put in 2d4 kobolds. Then you rolled for furnishings and you got a Stone Throne. So you put this in: “Stone Throne: Dwarven characters will immediately recognize that this throne is of dwarven construction, however, a successful intelligence attribute check, a detect construction tricks check, or a lore check will inform the characters that there is no known connection between Varkooth and the dwarven clans of the region. This begs the question of where the throne came from. It is obviously thousands of years old and will need much further research.”

And this is where my comments about butterfly wings come in. Over and over and over again. “Failure causes the left arm of the statue to break off, in a similar fashion to the right.” Ok. And? Nothing. You come across a bloody altar: “As to the location of the altar’s victim, there is no sign.”  over and over and over again there’s a feature of the room that gets a decent description, as if it should be meaningful and important to play, but it is not. It’s just describing a rock that is in the room. 

And then there are missed opportunities. The adventure ALMOST gets there in some place. “A detect construction tricks check can determine that the room is not safe but will likely hold for some time longer. The stonework of the circular stairs should give anyone pause, as there are several stairs that have crumbled away to gravel. A successful detect construction tricks check can determine that the stairs are sturdy enough for descent at a half movement rate, however” And if I don’t half move? And time and again there are places and things that SHOULD have an impact that get no explanation or description of effects at all. I’d waste most of my characters lifetime restoring and making offerings at altars in this without effect. There are intriguing possibilities that are just ignored while shit like that stone throne, which does nothing, get a description. 

There is little in the way of an OOB. I mentioned monsters on the map, which is good, but nothing beyond that. People stand in their rooms to die. Eve the drow that show up don’t do anything but stand there. “The bugbears have a 2-in-6 chance of hearing the characters coming down the hall, unless the characters are successfully moving silently” Yeah, that’s what move silently does. In one instance there are kobolds that may react: “however, they may be drawn to the sound of fighting above them.” That comes from some kobolds at the bottom of a stair. They would be reacting to the room above them, so to find this and employ it in the adventure you have to actually look at a room on a different dungeon level. How the fuck m I supposed to to that during play? Treasure in rooms that the monster visit, but that they have not looted? Sure! Why not!

There is, actually, very little to set this apart from a hack like B2. Minimal room descriptions expanded upon to column length with little actually adding to the adventure. Is B2 bad? Meh. But I can tell you that B2 expanded to a column per room would be bad if the added text didn’t add anything.

This is $9 at DriveThru. The preview is the first six pages, which shows you absolutely nothing of the adventure. The preview is meant to help us determine if we want to buy it, so it should show what the encounters, etc are like.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/554271/the-sunken-fortress-of-varkooth-ose-edition?1892600

As I’ve been looking back at my last 40 years in the tabletop hobby, especially the transition from playing at home to getting involved in the wider community, this just wouldn’t have happened without Daniel Perez, known to many in the scene as Highmoon.

Daniel gave me this card at Gen Con 2011. I don’t think the contact information is current, but I keep the card!

I first crossed paths with Daniel back in the early 90s at Metro Comics. We had a lot of friends in common, though surprisingly, I don’t think we actually rolled dice at the same table back then.

Daniel eventually moved to the US, and we lost touch for a bit. But right around 2006, the internet did its thing. We reconnected while he was writing TTRPG supplements, posting about his games, and co-hosting a podcast about the origins of the Puerto Rico role-playing scene. He was always a key figure in supporting the island’s gaming scene in those days. Seeing him again at Gen Con in 2007, even just briefly, was fantastic.

Shortly after that, he invited me to join a group he had just created on Facebook in the early days: Puerto Rico Role Players.

That invitation completely changed the trajectory of my gaming life. Daniel brought me on as an administrator and relentlessly encouraged me to get online, connect with other gamers, and start blogging. He was the catalyst that pushed me out of my immediate circle and into the role of a community organizer. Without his initial push, my involvement with PR Role Players, my writing, and the connections I’ve made over the last couple of decades wouldn’t exist in the same way.

Daniel could not be with us at the first Geeknic in 2010, but we printed this.

Daniel is still pouring his creativity into his projects today. He has a fantastic collection of his own TTRPG games, zines, and supplements available online. If you appreciate indie creators who have been championing this hobby for decades, you absolutely need to check out his work.

You can find his games and zines over on his Gumroad page here: https://danielmperez.gumroad.com/

Take a look, grab a few PDFs, and support one of the foundational voices of the Boricua Gamers community!

By Nicole Mattos, Icaro Agostino
Angry Golem Games
OSE
Levels 1-3

In ancient times, the region was crossed by famous trade routes, and many nomadic groups passed through on their way to distant destinations. Today, the area lies mostly deserted, though it still bears traces of the once-great Anhurak. Among the sunken ruins, a few half-buried houses remain visible. At the center of the settlement rises the Hollow Tower, once home to the fabled Star Devourer.

This sixteen page adventure uses two pages to describe thirteen rooms in a tower with a one room tomb nearby. Overpowered opponents and lots of backstory detract from simple, plain rooms, also full of backstory. Worst of all, for a book telling you how to devour stars, there is no instruction on how to devour stars. 

Ok, so, there’s also a small number of hexes. The giant ant hex is a page long, with ¾ of it being backstory and explanations.  It ends with “When reaching the lair, roll 4d6 to determine how many Giant Ants are there. If the PCs find a way to explore the lair, it’s possible to find 1d10 × 1,000gp of gold nuggets, mined by the ants” That’s what you get. That’s what you get for a page. 

And that’s the story of this adventure. There are TONS of backstory and padding. The first real page of the adventure is number six, with backstory, with the tome up till then full of forwards and title pages and the like. I get it, PDF pages are free. But the actual adventure has to the focus on the writing. All of this trade dress, the seemingly deriguour of putting together an adventure, simply distracts the designer. You odn’t need it. Any of it. Put the effort in to the actual adventure.

Another hex has a simple one room tomb of The Star Devourer. Open the casket inside and you meet the 6HD AC2 dude. “He will speak to the party, pleading his case and complaining of the injustice he suffered.” I’m not sure why he is pleading. He’s already been freed by the time you speak to him. But, whatever. He sets about destroying your level ones. 

The main focus here is a small tower in a ruined city. We’re looking at four floors with about thirteen rooms. Exciting rooms such as “Kitchen: Where the servants plotted the coup. Contains three wall counters, a large central table, and flour sacks. 1d6 x 50 gp wine bottles are on the counters. The first time a bottle is taken, a Yellow Mold releases a spore cloud.” The coup being the plot to trap the dude in the tomb. Backstory. A very plain description. “ervants’ Quarters: Dusty, abandoned, and filled with simple beds.” Look, these sorts of rooms can work. Empty rooms serve a purpose in an adventure. And, certainly, an empty room doesn’t need to have the most evocative description ever written. But when the ENTIRE adventure is like that I have to wonder, where did things go wrong? What led someone to think that two pages of rooms in a sixteen page adventure was a great idea? 

We’re told in one place there are ghostly sightings in the garden. There are no ghostly sightings in the garden. There’s a room with three doors. “Right door” leads to a cold, frozen, empty region.” Huh? There’s a fucking stone golem in the tower. Level one?! Sure, sometimes a monster is actually a trap or a special, but this isn’t that. This is just a small tower with a stone golem in it. How do you do this?

The dude, the dude in the tomb, the central point of the adventure, The Star Devourer. Yup, he ate all the stars. Hope your game doesn’t have any. But, more to the point, room one has a book in it called “How to eat the stars”, detailing how to eat the stars. That’s it. Nothing more. Well, how do I eat the stars and what happens when I do? Yes, I realize we’re told the book is incomplete, but, what if I follow the instructions anyway? 

There’s no real adventure here, not really. There are some things to stab. There are some keys to find and doors to open. But it’s all in this extremely minimalistic style that provides absolutely no specificity at all. And, of course, all surrounded by lots of backstory.

I gave this one a shot because of the whole Star Devourer thing. I was wrong.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is the first seven pages, which means you get to see all of the boilerplate shit and a page of backstory. Bad preview; it needs to show us what we’ll actually be playing so we can make an informed purchasing decision.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/540864/fortnightly-adventures-0-the-hollow-tower-ose?1892600

By 2007, I had been playing at Sammy’s house for about two years. We were deep into my second D&D 3.5 run, having just wrapped a Tri-Stat dX sci-fi game—set in the same universe as an Alternity campaign we’d played years prior. But I wasn’t just there for my own sessions; I was constantly dropping in on other games at Sammy’s, too.

The Hideout of the Mequetrefes

To the best of my knowledge, Sammy’s house was the original location of the first FLGS in Puerto Rico: The Role-Playing Emporium. I’ve erroneously identified it as the Gaming Emporium in the past, but more on that later! Although the store had closed years before, Sammy kept the old shelves and some inventory in an apartment at the back of the house. It was anchored by a gaming table with a large, gridded, erasable board affixed right to the top.

Sammy and Tato at the Lair of the Mequetrefes

It was a mix of game room, man cave, and den of iniquity, with a rotating crew of gamers, young and old, sitting at that table. He called his crew the Mequetrefes (good-for-nothings or busybodies).

Peter, a longtime friend and former regular in our group, had moved on to other campaigns at Sammy’s. I believe he was the one who started organizing the trip to Gen Con 2007, though I heard about it from one of my players, Luis Alvarado.

I had always wanted to go to Gen Con, so I was immediately on board. In 2007, along with Sammy, Peter, Luis, Tato, and Piwie, we made the pilgrimage to the holy land of gaming in Indiana. It was a magical time, and honestly, it deserves its own separate post. Strangely enough, I didn’t meet many new gamers there; I mostly stuck to my pack and didn’t branch out much while in Indianapolis.

From left to right: Peter, Luis, Roberto (me), Piwie, Sammy, Tato, Roberto (me again!), Sammy, Piwie, Daniel, and Tato

I did, however, run into a long-time friend: Daniel Perez, better known as Highmoon.

The Highmoon!

Let’s rewind. I met Daniel at Metro Comics in the early 90s. He came to my house a few times, and we had friends in common, though I don’t think we ever actually played together back then. He also spent a lot of time at the Role-Playing Emporium, so Sammy was another link between us.

He eventually moved to the US, and we lost touch for a while, but social media helped us reconnect. Daniel was a key figure in supporting the Puerto Rico gaming community in the early 2000s. By around 2006, he was writing TTRPG supplements, posting about his games, and hosting a podcast with our mutual friend, Braulio.

I listened to at least two episodes where they discussed the origins of the PR TTRPG scene. Braulio actually owned a store called Gaming Emporium—a tribute to Sammy’s Role-Playing Emporium. (And there lies the source of my confusion between the two names!) I remember talking to Daniel back then about wanting to do more for the island’s gaming community.

Seeing him at Gen Con in 2007, however briefly, was amazing. We stayed in contact, and in the early days of Facebook, he invited me to a group he had created: Puerto Rico Role Players.

Boricuas Roleros

That group was transformative for me. It connected me to a broader gaming community, some I knew, many I didn’t. Daniel made me an administrator and encouraged me to get online, connect with other gamers, and start blogging.

I wasn’t quite ready for the blogging part yet, so I poured my passion into growing Puerto Rico Role Players. Slowly but surely, the group expanded. Around 2008 or 2009, we tried to organize a Thanksgiving meet-up. I know Vincent (a fellow admin), Gilberto, and others made it, though I couldn’t attend. By 2009, members were meeting informally at small-genre cons on the island, and we decided it was time to organize an official event to promote the group and teach new players how to play.

While this was going on, I began reading blogs and leaving comments, which led me to another pivotal figure in my life.

Enter the Stargazer

Michael and I were talking the other day, and we think we started writing back and forth around 2008. It is strange to have such a dear friend whom I write to almost every day but have never met in person. Over the past 18 years, Michael has become someone I respect and care about deeply.

He invited me to collaborate on his blog. I was reluctant at first, but his and Daniel’s encouragement, combined with the work I was doing with Puerto Rico Role Players, finally pushed me to write my first post.

2010 Was a Great Year

Puerto Rico Role Players at Central Fan Fest 3, March 2nd, 2010

• February 19th: I wrote my first post for Stargazer’s World!
• March 2nd: We held the first official Puerto Rico Role Players event at Central Fan Fest 3 in Cidra, sharing our love for TTRPGs and running demos.
• April 11th: We hosted our first Geeknic—a picnic for geeks where we ate, played games, and bonded as a community.

The first Geeknic, April 11th, 2010

A year later, in 2011, after two more Geeknics, we held a “Geek Caucus” for volunteers and organized a group of admins to keep the momentum going.

Geek Caucus at Sizzler

I continued posting regularly here at Stargazer’s World. In February of that same year, a local newspaper even interviewed me for a special section on hobbies (I’ve been interviewed twice since then for other articles and videos). I also returned to Gen Con in 2011, this time with press credentials, writing coverage for the blog.

Gen Con 2011

In the years since, Puerto Rico Role Players has organized 29 Geeknics, Painting Days, demos at local conventions, Halloween Spooktaculars, and holiday events. I jumped into #RPGChat and joined RPG a Day the year after it began, posting on the blog, social media, and eventually my YouTube channel.

From the Pit

By 2017, I was fully immersed. I was blogging intermittently, the admin for PR Role Players, running demos, and engaging with the online world. Then I had another crazy idea: Why not stream a game?

That year, my friend Carlos Steffens opened a new FLGS, The Gaming Pit. I wanted to playtest the new edition of Alternity, and I thought: what better way to support him and the new game than to stream the adventure live?

The Alternity playtesters

It was a very amateurish Facebook endeavor, full of silly mistakes—like starting the stream with the camera sideways. I only intended to do two sessions and be done, but the group got hooked. Through that game, I connected with two PR Role Players members, José García and Felipe, and reconnected with AJ, whom I knew from the old Metro Comics days.

We decided to keep the cameras rolling, and Desde La Fosa (literally From the Pit) was born.

We played Star Frontiers, FrontierSpace, Silent Legions, the Free RPG Day Torg adventure, World Wide Wrestling, Legacy: Life Among the Ruins 2e, and I’m sure I’m forgetting others. You can see some of those games on the Desde la Fosa YouTube channel. It was never a professional studio production, but we had so much fun.

And then Hurricane María happened.

It changed everything. That is a subject for a future post, covering the next period in my gaming history.

“But wait!” you say. “This was all about community in the larger TTRPG context. What about your actual weekly game? The people you play with?”

Well, that’s the subject for the NEXT post. You did notice the title said, “Part 1,” right?

By Andreas Wille
Medora Games
OSR
Levels 2-3

Endless is the punishment of those that dare challenge divinity… Deep within an endless steppe, a weathered mausoleum stands alone. Its ancient walls, once adorned with beautiful carvings, are naught more than blank stone, marked by time. It would be entirely unremarkable, were it not for the incessant howling spewing from its darkened depths.

This eight page adventure uses four pages to describe seven rooms in an old tomb complex. I can get behind the concepts of a couple of the encounters, but the text is abstracted, the tomb small, and the treasure pretty much nonexistent. 

Endless punishment for those that dare challenge divinity?!?!  Qui audet adipiscitur!

This is a small tomb that always has a howling sound coming from it. It’s got a couple of things inside of it that are almost quite good. We’ve got some undead trapped in a room, screaming, their hands reduced to bloody stumps from clawing at the walls to get out. In another, undead beg to be released from their curse, holding armsfulls of charms and amulets and stuff draped from their hands. Very nice specificity there. That’s a great example of brief specificity that can really ground an encounter and make it come alive. IN another place you’ve got these two desert nomads trapped in a room, jailed there, so to speak, by the local nomads while they try and figure out what to do with them. One “Kidnapped multiple infants and left them to die in his anger about his own lack of children.” and will backstab the party if they find any significant treasure, while the second killed her brother in cold blood and “Stands by what she did, will help in a fight but is headstrong and does not like being challenged.” Again, great specificity that really gives the DM something to run with while playing them. If the entire adventure was like this then I’d be in a much different mood this morning. There’s also this little wandering table for an encounter in the desert leading to the tomb. The people encounters on there are integrated in to the rumor table, so, if you give the nomad, who is asking for water, some then he will give you a rumor. That’s a nice touch.

But, alas, it is not.

The tomb is quite small, with its seven rooms. These small adventures don’t really have room to breathe, so encounters like those two nomads are not really going to have much room to play out. There are these limitations that come with these short dungeons and they don’t mesh really well with the more dynamic and potential energy that something like the nomads could bring. And, of course, there’s not much exploration complexity here with only seven rooms. You’re looking at a simple star design, with a central room and six rooms hanging directly off of it. The central room has a puzzle that opens the last door, to the core heretic, so there is at least some not stabbing here. 

There’s a disconnect here between the dungeon environment and what’s actually going on inside. The setup is that the tomb “howls”, but you don’t really get any howling until you open the final door. Those undead clawing at the doors? Nope. The nomads locked in their room? Nope. This should be a noisy place but you’d never know it from the text. I really don’t like a “oh, yeah, you hear a lot of yelling” that only happens once you open a door and the DM gets to the text they need to read. This kind of light/noise/monster reactions are a sort point for me, in review after review. A room is not stand along thing, it exists in an environment and the DM needs help understanding that environment without making a lot of map and margin notes themselves. 

Each room leads off with a short one to two line sentence (in italics. UG! Tis the old wound ..) that is … I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s read-aloud or a summary or what. “The mausoleum’s ancient stonework is slowly succumbing to the elements. Spine-tingling howls echo from the decaying doorway.” This is not the most evocative description ever. “An angelic statue sits behind a stone sarcophagus that emits the constant, ear-piercing howl that gives the tomb its name.” Nor this. “Four statues of ancient gods adorn this long, dry chamber. Their judging gaze falls upon an elaborately carved door at the far end.” It just seems abstracted to me. A summary of the room, not a brief description. Maybe the lack of adjectives or adverbs to liven them up? The entrance is super bring, that “slowly succumbing to the elements.” It has a bend of fiction writing to it, rather than adventure writing, a common ailment with designers. I know evocative writing is hard, but this is something else. Like people are afraid to actually write a description of the room that means something. 

And the details of the room fall in to this same problem. Ancient gods? Which ones? How do I know they are ancient gods? Gods of what? It’s like someone write “there’s a temple to a god here,” Uh. Ok. That could mean anything, and it’s little better than ‘you enter a room.” 

Trease is light. VERY light. This is, I think, a symptom of “OSR.” It can mean just about anything these days, from treasure light to gold=xp or something similar. “Each deserter holds d4 religious paraphernalia such as charms and rosaries worth 5gp each.” We all know the real treasure is in the lairs, but this IS he lair. The final room does get you some magic plate and sword, but up till then it’s mostly drinking money. 

It’s constrained by its size and the descriptions tend to be abstracted. Good bulleting to help the DM run it, but the lack of specificity is jarring. And, space is wasted on explanations. Spending a third of a page on the heretics backstory buys us nothing. Wasting space on a shrubbery table doesn’t help us. This needs to be trimmed and the extra space focused in. The end result of this is a rather bland adventure.

This is $1.50 at DriveThru. No preview. Boo! Show us an encounter so we can make an informed purchasing decision. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/555055/the-howling-tomb?1892600

By Scott_M
First Era Adventures
OSRIC
Levels 1-3

In a lonely glade stands the abandoned tower of a once-legendary wizard. They say he kept great wealth and magical wonders hidden inside, but he vanished long ago and with him went the secret location of his treasure. Is there something to these rumors, or is the tower merely the sad legacy of a dead wizard?

This nineteen page adventure uses about twelve pages to describe about 35 locations in a small wizards tower and the dungeon underneath. Hidden depth without extreme obtuseness, it follows up on classic hiding place and delivers on both Ruins vibe and Magical Wonder vibe. 

I’m gonna botch some, right up front, and then tell you about the things this does right, which is quite a bit. This needed a very hard pass in editing to trim the text. It’s not really engaging in any of the classic bloated text issues, it just needs a real hard pass to get the focus tightened up and perhaps just a tad more in the way of formatting to help focus the DM in on the important bits. I think the text is probably just a tad too conversational, which combines a bit with a need to work on the evocative writing.  The evocative bit gets a pass, it’s hard, I know, but it also needs to be there. Here is “Kitchen”, for example: “Between a pair of open windows on the NE wall stands a battered iron stove with a toppled pipe. Next to it is an empty coal box. A pile of debris and smashed furniture clutters the SE corner. More kobold tracks enter and exit the room. [Para Break] The debris includes the remains of pantry shelves, a butcher’s block, and a shattered porcelain basin. Concealed under the pile is a trapdoor in the floor which opens into an enclosed stairway down to the cellar (T12).” Focusing just on the writing, this isn’t terrible but the sentence structure is a bit passive in places. “Between a pair” , and almost certainly irrelevant. It needs a few more adjectives tossed in and a bit of the padding tossed out. It’s decent, but I always want to see magnificence. \

There’s also this mania present, that is seen from time to time with certain designers, with dimensions. “Throughout this adventure, measurements are described in terms of feet (‘) and inches (“); dimensions in terms of length (l), width (w), height (h), depth (d), diameter (dm), and radius (r); and cardinal directions in terms of North (N), South (S), East (E), and West (W). Map grid scale = (5’sq) in the tower and (10’sq) in the dungeon.” Dude has some unresolved trauma, obviously, the same way I do with Castle Greyhawk. 

Ok, done bitching I guess. 

The vibe here is really old abandoned wizards tower. Like, three stories high. Walls crumbling, Holes in the roof. Getting close to “mostly ruins.” And those tower levels really bring that vibe. Vines growing about. Weakened floors if you cross over the middle of them, treacherous stairways. Dust. A giant spider lurking. A couple of centipedes. It has that classic ruined gatehouse vibe going on, with debris and vermin. And then, if you pay the fuck attention, it transforms. You might gain entrance to the dungeon level. Which is a full on Colored Mists.archways/magical effects everywhere place, complete with illusory wizard welcoming you. Congrats, you made it to the ACTUAL adventure! All of that hard work and cleverness up top in the ruins paid off and now you can really dig in to the twenty rooms in the dungeon. 

I’m really up on the classic elements, especially up top. Holes in the walls and roof, vines up the side of the tower for alternate entry points. The center of the floor being weak so you better walk along the edges. A chimney, with giant centipede up it if you go poking around for treasure (which there is.) Old moldy ragged falling apart carpet, waterlogged. With a key hidden under it. And the vines up the side? Poisin fucking ivy.  Whens the last fucking time you saw poison ivy in an adventure?! I fucking love it. You are embedded in the mundane rather than exoticism, at least in the tower ruin. The whole of the encounters, the challenges, work to create this awesomeness of a grounded vibe.

Are you paying the fuck attention? Cause upstairs, in all the dust, is one spot in the floor WITHOUT dust, that contains an invisible cabinet. Downstairs, in the kitchen, that pile of debris? Did you move it? Cause there’s a trapdoor under it to the basement. And if you find the trapdoor, and the invisible cabinet, and some other shit, then, in the basement, you can find the entrance to the dungeon.

And we have a full on wizard illusion in the entryway that is all “Welcome Adventurers!” He’s hidden his great treasures here … and it’s a puzzle/challenge dungeon. Not my favorite genre. But, as there things go, not terribly done. 

“Surrounding the central column but concealed by dust and found only by sweeping the area clear, is a pattern of 16 wedge-shaped stones (10’dm).“ You did sweep the dust in the room, right? To find the concealed holes on the floor? No? This isn’t Knutz bad, as far as the hidden depth shit goes, but it’s also very clearly for people paying attention. The puzzle rooms can get long, think a page or so, and there are decent number of them in the twenty. There are clues in the dungeon in one place that lead to solutions elsewhere. Obtuse clues. “Anyone viewing the tapestry for more than 1 round sees the scene animate: The wizard and his mount race alongside two more horses that enter the frame (3 horses total). This is a clue to the button code in D7 (Summer = #3).” 

But the magical effects here are wondrous also. In that same room, a gallery, there’s a picture of a knight and green dragon battle “The viewer sees the figures animate in battle, but when the dragon rears back and unleashes its breath weapon, an actual cloud of chlorine gas fills a (20’dm) area in front of the painting. Anyone in the area must save vs. Breath or die. If all affected creatures make successful saves, the cloud transforms into a shower of 500 gp instead.” That’s fun! It FEELS like magic. The puzzles are tough. The place is deadly. But it doesn’t feel unfair or gimpy, just unusual in 2026. . 

I’m going to leave you with this room description. You tell me what’s interesting.”Smashed furniture, dirt, and leaves pile up against the walls. Between the open windows on the SE wall stands a mildewed stone fireplace, long cold. The floor is filthy, though a moldy, rotten rug covers the middle. Pieces of a wooden chandelier dangle limply from the rafters.” I’ll wait, lah lah lah. Tradoor under the debris. Centipedes up the chimney, along with a treasure. Key under the rug. That’s a decent amount of interactivity in one room.

Classic ruins, classic dungeon. Decent enough room descriptions with great interactivity. Hard as fuck, from a “are you paying attention to findthe hidden shit” standpoint. Could use tightened up, a lot, and maybe a few more adjectives sprinkled in. 

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages and shows you the upper rooms and several dungeon rooms. More than enough to get a chance two see the two vibes, the hidden depth, and what the puzzles can be like in the dungeon. Great preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/553734/bergummo-s-tower?1892600

By Jason Youngdale
Youngdale Productions
OSE
Level 1

In the heart of the Wyrwood (the forest that surrounds Caladorei), veiled in mist and myth, stands the Whispering Tower, a slender spire of obsidian stone said to house the secrets of the vanished Archmage Elyrium. The tower is not defended by monsters but by his love of riddles, clever traps, and illusions. The adventurers must navigate its winding stairways, decipher cryptic puzzles, and avoid ancient snares to uncover a long-lost magical artifact: the Mirror of Untold Memory. None that have ventured there have yet to return!

This 26 page single column adventure uses about eight pages to describe fourteen linear rooms in a wizard tower. It’s a one-dimensional puzzle dungeon where you answer riddles out loud. 

I didn’t know this weeks theme was puzzle dungeons, but I think this is the second in a row now. I think I hate them? In general? I suspect, though, that I hate one-dimensional dungeons. All fighting. All social. All puzzles. I’m sure I do have somewhat of a bias towards the classic exploratory dungeon. You know, a little social, a little combat, a few puzzles and traps, things to discover, and explore. I can accept a plot adventure, they don’t need to be one-dimensional. It’s these sorts of blunt instruments that I loathe.

I knew the job was dangerous when I took it and read “The tower is not defended by monsters but by his love of riddles, clever traps, and illusions.” This then was the first sign I was in for it. And then, in the intro, I got “Success is measured by cleverness and character growth, not treasure alone.” Yeah, how much fucking XP is cleverness and character growth worth? Cleverness happens in order to get the XP with low risk and character development, not growth, is a side effect. 

How about a table of a dozen hooks? Hooks such as: “Scholarly Commission: A reclusive gnome sage hires the party to retrieve the Mirror of Untold Memory from Elyrium’s tower. Lost Kin: A local villager’s child has gone missing, last seen wandering toward the tower. Dream Calling: One or more adventurers began having dreams of whispered riddles and a spiraling multi-colored tower.” These must be the most hackneyed hooks possible. “You have a dream!” or you’ve been hired! More is not better. The sushi buffet is not good. 

Inside is the usual assortment of mistakes. “A huge iron door with no handle or keyhole seems to be the front door of the Tower.” Is it the fucking front door or not? Is there another door? No? Then that’s the front fucking door. These kinds of mistakes are all over the place.

Hows about that interactivity though? “A well-worn plaque on the door reads: “I am not alive, but I grow; I do not breathe, but I need air. What am I?” Answer: Fire” Thrilling! Adventurous! A place of wonder and delight! 

No? You need more? How about confusion! “Dusty tomes float midair, circling a pedestal with a glowing closed book on top of it. Puzzle: To reach the real book (a purple one), players must read verses in a particular order (clues hidden in nearby inscriptions) that spell out “TRUTH”.” That’s the room. It’s a fucking synopsys for a room, not a room itself. But, that’s what you’re getting here. Just a brief overview, abstracted, Nothing specific. Take your “1001 room ideas” booklet and just turn it in to a dungeon! 

Still not enough? “A circular room with twelve stone columns, each marked with a symbol of a zodiac. The floor is made up of mosaics also depicting the zodiac signs (12 in all). Players must determine which symbol is missing on the columns that is on the floor (it’s “Virgo” — which is on a floor mosaic among the other zodiac mosaics on the floor).” Twelve symbols in the zodiac. Twelve columns each with a zodiac symbol. Twelve pictures on the floor of the zodiac. Which one is missing? Uh … none? Twelve and Twelve? I guess one repeats twice somewhere, on two different columns? I’m not even sure I could name all twelve zodiac symbols, good thing the adventure is helping out there!

Still not enough? You want more pretension?! Well, ok! “Each character must look into the mirror and speak aloud a personal revelation. They must reveal a deep dark secret to the party. Those who accept their truth may take the mirror; those who reject it are teleported outside the tower, taking 1d4 Psychic damage.” What the fuck does it mean to reject the personal revelation you just spoke out loud to everyone? You voluntarily spoke it, I think that means you accept it? I don’t understand the fail condition at all. I don’t even see how lying fails this room. 

You want some of that sweet sweet treasure? “Scrolls of Elyrium: 1d4 rare spells or ancient arcane theories. These can be in Elyrium’s Study.” This is lame.

Everything here is just so absurdly low effort. Not even bothering to come up with some spells? Not listing the zodiacs? There’s no specificity. The riddle rooms are inane, just read a plaque and answer a riddle? Really? 

This is what D&D is. A game of telephone, played from the early 70’s till now. Fifty years of people subtly changing the message, in purpose or by accident or ignorance, until the original intent is lost. Look man, I can accept the storyteller garbage, at least as an activity if not a game. It’s not for me but I can see some Baron Muchhousen shit. But this shit? No. 

There is something wonderful about free will and the lack of barriers. You get to do it. YOU. No one is there to stop you. The myth of the rugged individuality that is our soul. But, I believe the existential assertion also says that you must KNOW you are without meaning. You are condemned to be free, and you know it. This is what it looks like when you are condemned to be free and don’t know it. Sure, you CAN just off the cliff when faced with the boulder, but maybe also prepare a little and figure out what an adventure SHOULD look like and what makes up a good one before flinging your own shit out there.

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages. You get to see a part of the first room. Shitty preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/555314/the-whispering-tower-of-elyrium?1892600