Kingdom Death: Monster Hands-On: Controversial Kickstarter Makes Good

Kingdom Death: Monster Demo at GenCon

Kingdom Death: Monster in action (click to expand)

When Kingdom Death: Monster’s Kickstarter launched in November 2012, it crushed its goals with more than $2 million in funding. The game was, shall we say, ambitious. The brainchild of Adam Poots, the Kickstarter showed beautiful, pre-production resin miniatures while promising an expansive board game, and promised an almost unbelievable set of contents:

  • 4 35mm-scale survivor miniatures
  • 4 copies of each of 6 armor kits (one armor kit can equip all 4 survivors)
  • 7 large-sized boss miniatures
  • 400+ cards
  • 2’ x 3’ game board
  • 15 terrain tokens
  • 6 custom dice
  • 1 rulebook-storybook, with art throughout

When I heard a Kickstarter promised such outstanding miniatures alongside a board game with euro-style development, RPG-style narrative, and tabletop wargame-style tactical elements at an almost comically high price–backers pledged $150 for the game–I was skeptical. Like many people who didn’t back the project, I assumed the game would be a loose justification to sell the admittedly gorgeous minis. Three years later, after multiple delays and setbacks, I hadn’t given the idea much thought. Saturday at GenCon, the guys from Board Game Replay invited me to join them for their demo of Kingdom Death (the full video is here)—now through production, boasting a 17 pound core game box, and sporting a shocking $400 MSRP.

I wasn’t any less skeptical, and I couldn’t have been more wrong.

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Podcast Preview: Total Party Thrill Episode 1: Heists and Swashbucklers

You may have noticed a dearth of updates around these parts recently, and that’s because I’ve been hard at work on a new project: a podcast, titled Total Party Thrill.

We’re officially launching our first few episodes on iTunes on August 17th, but I wanted to give a preview of what we have planned. You can listen to a preview of our first episode, “Heists and Swashbucklers,” below:

Download Total Party Thrill Episode 1 Preview: Heists and Swashbucklers

On Total Party Thrill, my co-host I-Hsien and I will share lessons learned from our recent three-year, levels 1-20 D&D 5th Edition Eberron campaign, pulling out story ideas and inspiration for use in your own campaign, as well as providing more tactile advice to ensure your sessions run smoothly. We also include our Character Creation Forge segment, in which we take a character archetype from popular fiction that doesn’t fit into D&D’s traditional classes and build a character using only the options available for D&D Adventurer’s League. In this preview episode, we discuss Heist encounters and build the Errol Flynn-style Swashbuckler (spoiler: neither of us used the Rogue class.)

I’ve been heads-down recording, editing, and otherwise prepping everything we need in order to launch this project, and I would love to hear your honest feedback. Please feel free to tweet your thoughts to me at @Mundangerous, or drop us an email at totalpartythrill@gmail.com.

Thanks!

Shane

Review: Dungeons & Dragons and Fantasy Grounds, A Happy Medium

Note: The following article originally appears on The Mad Adventurers Society in three parts (one two three.) It has been consolidated and reprinted here with the author’s permission.

When it was announced a few months ago, I wrote at length of virtual tabletop app Fantasy Grounds and its acquisition of the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition license. After that discussion, the folks at Fantasy Grounds (www.fantasygrounds.com) were kind enough to send me a copy of the 5E content for review. I downloaded the game on Steam, loaded the Player’s Handbook module (“Complete Core Class Pack”), the Monster Manual module (“Complete Core Monster Pack”), and the Lost Mine of Phandelver adventure module, grabbed a few friends, and ran a trial adventure.

This is a hands-on review of Fantasy Grounds’ D&D 5E licensed content. We’ll start by discussing my impressions of Fantasy Grounds as a virtual tabletop overall, followed by the Player’s Handbook licensed content aimed at players, and conclude with a discussion of the licensed content for Dungeon Masters, namely the D&D Complete Core Monster Pack and Lost Mine of Phandelver adventures. Please note that there are spoilers for the first act of Lost Mine of Phandelver contained within.

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Keith Baker, Phoenix: Dawn Command, and the New Frontier of RPG Design

Phoenix: Dawn Command

The following article was originally posted by the author on The Mad Adventurers Society, and is reprinted here with permission. You can find the original here.

When I initially received an email from game designer Keith Baker, I was astounded. Not only is Baker the creator of the Eberron setting for Dungeons & Dragons, as well as the designer of the narrative card game Gloom, but he had also just launched a Kickstarter for his latest game, Phoenix: Dawn Command. I knew he’d be swamped with promoting his Kickstarter, and I am a nobody blogger who got his attention on Twitter and sent him a 750-word email for his trouble. I was working on a story about a growing trend of what I have dubbed “prop-based” RPGs: games that use proprietary elements, such as special dice, unique tokens, or, in Baker’s case, cards. I wanted to know what was behind this trend; in a matter of months, we’ve seen Kickstarters for games that use proprietary decks of cards, like FAITH, Neon Sanctum, and Phoenix: Dawn Command, and there has to be a reason that designers are focusing on cards.

I still haven’t answered that question to my satisfaction, but Keith is such an insightful designer that I’ve spent the past couple weeks reexamining my own beliefs and principles when it comes to game design, specifically around conflict resolution. I’ve previously written about why the rules exist (spoiler: it’s to justify killing the characters when the players don’t want them to die.) Around these parts, MAS’s own dynamic duo, Sammy and Fiddleback, took a run at randomness and PC death on episode 65 the Potelbat podcast back in September (spoiler: everyone hates randomness.) As both a player and gamemaster, I am very much of the crunchy system mastery/optimization persuasion. I have spent hours poring over rulebooks precisely to understand and mitigate the randomness of die rolls in order to assure my character is reliably good at whatever it is he’s supposed to be good at, his “One Cool Thing,” if you will.

I’ve played dozens of different systems using a variety of mechanics: d20s, percentiles, dice pools, FUDGE dice, and whatever you want to call Fantasy Flight’s Star Wars dice. I’ve dismissed some for being to high variance—“swingy” like 40k RPGs—and some for being too low—“curved” like FATE and Dungeon World. Maybe what I’ve been looking for all along isn’t the right mathematical outcome curve of dice blended with the right measure of static modifiers and properly turned target numbers. Maybe what I really want is a slight preview of the next die roll. Maybe what I want is actually cards.

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FFG Releases Warhammer 40k: Dark Heresy 2E Character Sheet App

Dark Heresy Digital Character Sheet App

In April, Fantasy Flight Games released Enemies Within, the first splatbook expansion to their Warhammer 40k: Dark Heresy 2nd Edition RPG, to little fanfare. This week, to equally little fanfare, FFG released the Dark Heresy Digital Character Sheet app. Well damnit, there should be some fanfare, because this is awesome.

I’ve had a chance to peruse Enemies Within, which overall adds a lot of flavor and additional options for players and GMs without much in the way of power creep (though the Sororitas’ light power armor is a fair concern.) It’s a cool book for all the reasons I love the Dark Heresy line, and easily worth its $39.95 cover price ($19.95 for PDF). If you play DH 2E, you should check it out.

But today, we’re going to talk about the app.

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The Future of Virtual Tabletop: Fantasy Grounds, Roll20, and D&D 5E

Fantasy Grounds D&D 5E Core PHB: Class Info

Screenshot from Fantasy Grounds D&D Complete Core Class Pack

The following article was originally posted by the author on The Mad Adventurers Society, and is reprinted here with permission. You can find the original here.

Virtual tabletops—applications designed to replicate the in-person roleplaying experience for remote players—are a big deal for the future of the gaming industry. For players, it’s a way to play more games more often, as there’s no longer a need to be physically present in order to play. For publishers, it’s a chance to increase exposure to their games and further monetize their products. Some companies, like Evil Hat and Pinnacle Entertainment Group—publishers of FATE and Savage Worlds, respectively—have fully embraced digital content and make their core materials readily available on popular platforms like Fantasy Grounds. Other companies, like Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast, have been markedly slower to embrace technology.

There’s a convoluted history complicating Wizards’ path forward. With D&D Third Edition, the Open Gaming License made it easy for third-party applications to support the system, including virtual tabletops. Because of more tightly controlled licensing for its Fourth Edition, D&D 4E included a subscription-based rules compendium and character builder called D&D Insider, which, like D&D 4E in general, received a mixed reception from fans. The side effect was a severe limitation on support for virtual tabletops, which couldn’t integrate the 4E ruleset into their offerings. With D&D Fifth Edition, Wizards initially adopted yet another strategy: they partnered with digital textbook developer Trapdoor Technologies to develop a hybrid rules compendium/character builder/connected-at-the-table app called DungeonScape. The demos of DungeonScape won over many skeptics, but in the midst of a public beta test, Wizards of the Coast announced that it had terminated the project. Trapdoor tried to salvage the platform sans D&D 5E licensed content with a Kickstarter campaign in December, but fell more than $350,000 short of their funding goal. The licensing strategy of D&D 5E, and with it both its digital future and the future of virtual tabletop, was yet again in limbo.

That is, until last week. On April 8th, Wizards of the Coast and virtual tabletop app Fantasy Grounds announced the release of licensed D&D 5E content on the Fantasy Grounds platform. All of the rules content of the Player’s Handbook and Monster Manual, along with additional tokens and portraits, are now available . The content is pricey: $49.99 each for the full PHB or MM content (or subdivided into thematic sets ranging from $2.99 to $5.99) and $19.99 for The Lost Mines of Phandelver adventure from the Starter Set. Right now, though, Fantasy Grounds is the only place for players to get any D&D 5E content, period.

Depending on whom you ask, this news is either a great step forward for Wizards and D&D, or it’s an overpriced disaster. I’ll reserve judgment until I can actually use the modules, but either way, it’s sure to send shockwaves through the virtual tabletop landscape.

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