On Friday night, So You Want to Be a Game Master won the Gold ENNIE for Best RPG Related Product and the Alexandrian won a Gold ENNIE for Best Online Content. The Alexandrian is now an ENNIE Award-winning Youtube channel!
The bad news is that there’s yet another Hasbro / Wizards of the Coast scandal.
This video is exactly what you think it is… and also something completely different.
Released by Chaosium in 2021 as part of the 40th Anniversary celebrations for Call of Cthulhu, Keeper Tips: Collected Wisdom on Running Games is a pocket-sized hardcover filled with exactly what the title promises — a motley collection of small tips and random thoughts, each generally no longer than a paragraph, about running Call of Cthulhu games and RPGs in general.
(A “Keeper,” for those out of the loop, is what a game master is referred to as in Call of Cthulhu.)
It’s a handsome volume, with a faux-leather cover and gilt print accompanied by a burgundy bookmark ribbon. Very much the sort of thing you can drop into a pocket and draw out from time to ruminate upon its contents, which are roughly divided into a number of categories:
The tips themselves are drawn from almost two dozen Keepers associated with Call of Cthulhu from its very beginning to its most recent days. As editor Mike Mason writes, “Some of the tips are contradictory. Some repeat or reinforce advice. Imagine, if you will, that you are sat with a group of experienced Keepers, each sharing and building upon the ideas of the others. Take from this what you will.”
As you read through Keeper Tips, you will undoubtedly encounter much that is familiar, much that you agree with, and also much that you will disagree with. You may even read certain passages that will raise your hackles. But as I’ve slowly worked my way through the book, it has never failed to provoke a thoughtful insight.
I say “slowly,” and indeed this is how I would recommend one experience Keeper Tips. It’s a collection that invites you to read perhaps one or two pages at a time and then set it aside while you think about what you’ve read. Was there some new insight? How will you use it? Was there a unique twist or perspective on something you’ve done yourself? Is there something you vehemently disagree with? Why do you think it wrong and what would you do differently? Is this tip useful for tables with new players, experienced players, or both? And why?
Then, perhaps later in the day or the next day or a week later, you’ll pick the book up again and choose another page to meditate upon. Perhaps the next page. Or perhaps one that you flip to randomly.
To gives you a sampling of what you can expect to find inside, consider these tips:
Counsel your players to create characters that are involved in the story, rather than be passive observers. Example: an expedition to the Antarctic will be an active game for scientists and explorers, not so much for the pilot and radio operator.
Undermine the pillars of the PCs’ confidence. Are they members of an anti-Mythos organization? Drop hints that it has been infiltrated. Do they have academic allies? Strike those mentors with public disgrace. Do they have family? Keep the PCs afraid for them — or of them. Do they have high social statue or loads of income? Chip away at that through media gossip, the Company Board turning on them, threats of unemployment, a hostile company takeover, or a stock market slide.
When making NPCs, assign each of them an adjective (greedy, suspicious, trusting, etc.). This makes them easier to portray in a memorable and fun way for the players.
Pre-made NPCs can be useful as instant replacement investigators.
For an extended game, ask about an investigator’s history, and then say, “What was your first experience with the Mythos?” and let them make it up. The reason is to get past the boring, “No, no, this isn’t real,” part of the scenario. They ‘know’ it’s real.
Never be afraid to rewrite a scenario’s plot hook to better fit your party’s occupations or backstories. All the details in published adventures should be considered more as suggestions rather than as strict guidelines.
If you’d like to see more of the book “in action,” so to speak, I’ve actually featured it a few times on my Twitch streams, using it very much as I describe above as a spur for commentary and deeper thought. (You can see one of these streams here.)
Along similar lines, I think it could be quite rewarding to organize a GM’s book club, gathering fellow masters of the game and using Keeper Tips as a prompt text for any number of wide-ranging discussions.
Ultimately, whether for your own private circumspection or as the nucleus for shared discussion, I can strongly recommend slipping a copy of Keeper Tips into your own pocket.
Grade: B+
Editor: Mike Mason
Contributors: Daniel Aniolowski, Sean Branney, Allan Carey, Keris McDonald, Jason Durall, Paul Fricker, Bob Geis, Lynne Hardy, Bridgett Jeffries, Jo Kreil, David Larkins, Mike Mason, Mark Morrison, Thom Raley, Matthew Sanderson, Becca Scott, Seth Skorkowsky
Publisher: Chaosium
Price: $17.95
Page Count: 128
Bedlam in Neverwinter is a D&D-themed escape room board game for 2-6 players.
Which is a lot of stuff for designers George Feledichuk, David “Duvey” Rudow, and Leo Taylor to cram into one box.
If you’re not familiar with the escape room board game genre, the basic format is a box filled with hidden cards and sealed containers or envelopes. Players are presented with a series of puzzles, and the solution to each puzzle will indicate which card to draw or sealed box to open in order to find the next puzzle.
In the case of Bedlam in Neverwinter, this primarily takes the form of a card deck and map boards. Each card has a three-digit number on the back. The map boards, on the other hand, depict different locations that the players can explore, each labeled with a three-digit number which indicates which card to draw when you go there. In addition to advancing the narrative of the story, each card may also include instructions (to draw additional cards, for example) or a puzzle (the solution of which will be a three-digit number indicating which card to draw).
If you’re not familiar with D&D, then… Wait. Really?
In any case, D&D is a fantasy roleplaying game in which players create characters by selecting their race, class, and ability scores. The actions taken by these characters are resolved by rolling a 20-sided die, adding a bonus from a relevant ability score, and comparing the result to a target number. There’s also a combat system in which damage is tracked and characters die if they lose all of their hit points.
All of these elements are also found in Bedlam in Neverwinter, albeit in a heavily modified form: Players will create their characters by selecting from a familiar range of races and classes, each of which will grant them proficiency in one of the six ability scores. Each class also has a unique, themed skill/power and will gain additional abilities as they level up at the end of each adventure.
Various cards will require either solo checks (which the current player rolls) or group checks (everyone rolls and at least half the group must succeed). Each check has one or two ability scores associated with it, and if you have a matching ability score you add +1d6 to your d20 roll.
Combat is resolved via round-robin skill checks against the monster’s target number. Weapons and other items can be equipped, granting additional bonuses if your attack roll is high enough. (For example, if you roll 17+ with a Sword of Sharpness, you deal +1 damage.)
And that’s basically it: Bedlam in Neverwinter consists of three adventures, each with a separate deck of cards and map boards. As you play through each deck, you’ll discover and overcome puzzles and monsters. The box states that each adventure takes about 90 minutes, but our experience was closer to 2 hours. (But we did have an ultra-excited 7-year-old playing with us, which may have prolonged things a bit.)
IMPRESSIONS
There will be ONE MINOR SPOILER in the discussion that follows. It will have no impact or insight into the puzzles or other hidden secrets of the game, but ye have been warned.
My overall takeaway from Bedlam in Neverwinter is that it’s an extremely easy game. The box lists a difficulty of 4 out of 5, but at no point did the group I was playing with feel remotely challenged: The puzzles were all trivially dispatched and the combat never once made us feel in danger for our lives.
As a result, it really felt more like an activity than a game. I mentioned that we played it with a fairly young child, and that may be an ideal use case: A pleasant way to pass some time with your friends and/or family. We certainly enjoyed it as such.
The biggest question I have about the game is why, if it’s called Bedlam in Neverwinter, is the entire story set in Icewind Dale? It’s quite baffling, honestly. My best guess — and it’s just a wild guess — is that somebody said, “Don’t we have a movie coming out in 2023 that’s set in Neverwinter?” and a few references to Neverwinter were shoved in and a new title pasted on the cover.
(I’m not going to get more specific than this because, again, I’m trying to avoid spoilers. But it’s very baffling.)
Bedlam in Neverwinter’s biggest flaw, however, is the map boards. As I mentioned before, the idea is that you put a map board on the table and then each player chooses where they want to explore, places their miniature there, and reads the associated card describing what they find. Unfortunately, the illustrations on the map boards don’t match the card descriptions. The first sentence on a card will be something like, “This body appears to have been…” and you’ll look back to the map board in confusion because there’s nobody there.
The first few times this happens, you may think you’ve made a mistake, but you haven’t. The bigger problem, however, is that this failure is so pervasive that selecting map board locations is basically just random noise. Other decisions make this even worse. For example, there’s one map where a clearly Dexterity-based activity is depicted. So you send the Dexterity-proficient character and… ha! ha! Nope! The skill check here is a Charisma-based check where you encourage the most dexterous character in your group to do the activity. (The most dexterous character does not actually contribute to the check in any way.)
I’m not certain if this sort of thing was a deliberate bait-and-switch or just more bad design, but either way what could have been — and arguably should have been — the most significant interactive element in the game is needlessly rendered meaningless.
Like the rest of the escape room genre, once you’ve played through the content once, you’ll be done with the game forever.
Which, ultimately, brings us back to what I said before: The game basically plays itself, but the activities along the way are a pleasant way of passing the time.
You’ll want to keep in mind, though, that like other escape room board games, Bedlam in Neverwinter is not designed to be replayed: You’ll play this once and then never again. (Unlike some games of its type, however, Bedlam in Neverwinter is not destructive, so you could reseal the envelopes and pass it along to someone else easily enough.) You’ll want to keep that in mind when deciding whether or not to grab a copy.
Raiders of the Serpent Sea is a third-party campaign for D&D 5th Edition created by Brent Knowles, the lead designer of Dragon Age Origins, and released by Arcanum Worlds, who are also the publishers of Odyssey of the Dragonlords, Heroes of Baldur’s Gate, Minsc & Boo’s Journal of Villainy, and Chains of Asmodeus.
The campaign is set in a world inspired by Norse mythology, with the PCs as reavers seeking the immortality of glory in the shadow of a Ragnorak-esque apocalypse. When it hit Kickstarter I’d already been scoping out sea-based campaigns, and I’m always a sucker for Norse mythology, so it was nearly a no-brainer for me to back the five-hundred page mega-tome.
This, however, is not a review of the campaign book. It is, instead a review of the Player’s Guide that accompanies the campaign.
Personally, I’ve grown quite skeptical of player’s guides. In theory, the idea of a slim, slickly produced book that I could give to my players to get them amped up for an impending campaign sounds like a great idea. In practice, however, I’m almost always underwhelmed. The biggest problem tends to be that they’re cheaply produced by mostly copy-pasting text from the main book, which would be okay if it was properly rewritten for the players. But it frequently isn’t, resulting in a book that I can’t give to players without inundating them with spoilers that are better delivered during actual play. The result is a book with no utility at all.
It’s probably not surprising, therefore, that I skipped right past the Raiders of the Serpent Sea player’s guide and went directly to the main campaign book.
I quickly realized, however, that this was a mistake. The main campaign book kept referring to material from the Player’s Guide, and it quickly became apparent that this guide was, in fact, essential. Far from an afterthought, it had been designed as an integral part of the campaign.
So I set the campaign book aside and pulled out the Player’s Guide.
And I was deeply impressed by what I found.
THE WORLD OF GRIMNIR
The world of Grimnir was born from apocalypse: The Yoten had invaded the lands of the Vanir and, thanks to the betrayal of the mage-turned-god named Mirgal, had driven them to the verge of destruction. In the final battle, Aldyhn, the leader of the Vanir, slew Mirgal and performed a powerful rite which turned his blood and flesh and bone into the seeds of a new world. The Vanir fled into this new world, leaving the Yoten trapped behind.
The legacy of apocalypse, however, lies deep within the rock and waves of Grimnir, and now this world, too, is threatened with destruction.
As presented in this primer, I really like the world of Grimnir. It’s not just history with the numbers scratched off. Knowles has been legitimately inspired by myth and legend, and then built creatively from that inspiration to create something unique and fascinating.
For example, not all of the inhabitants of Grimnir crossed over from the old world. There are native peoples who were born with the world. Which raises a fascinating and fantastic dilemma: To whom does the world belong? Those who created it or those born to it? Both? Neither?
The gods, it should be noted, are not the Norse gods. Again, Knowles has taken inspiration, but created a legacy of fresh myth, redolent of Norse themes — of divine betrayals in a world born of betrayal; of a struggle against inevitable nihilism; of a warrior’s glory and doom — in new-minted wonder.
The major factions of Grimnir are the Raiders (i.e., your Viking heroes), the Baendur Kingdoms (young kingdoms ripe for raiding), and the Witches of the Ironwood (servants of a dark lord).
My only gripe with the presentation of Grimnir in the Player’s Guide is that the two-page map world map was printed with nearly all of the label layers turned off. I’m fairly certain this was a production error, but it makes the gazetteer and description of the world almost incoherent. If you’re giving the Player’s Guide to your players, I recommend also giving them a copy of the properly labeled world map from the full campaign book.
(To be honest, even with the labels turned on, there seem to be some inconsistencies between the map’s depiction of the world and the text. But it definitely helps.)
BACKGROUNDS
Raiders of the Serpent Sea includes several “epic backgrounds.” These backgrounds — the Bonded, the Cursed Raider, the Fallen, the Royal Heir, and the Vigilant One — are designed to be taken instead of the normal backgrounds from the Player’s Handbook.
What makes these epic backgrounds particularly notable is that they’ve been integrated into the campaign. While still giving the player a ton of freedom for customizing the details of their character, they provide a starting story connection, along with heroic tasks and epic goals seem to be designed so that they can potentially be achieved in several different ways during the campaign.
Now, I haven’t seen how the campaign actually executes on this concept from the other side, so I don’t know how well it actually pulls this off. But I like this A LOT.
I’ve talked before about how you should create characters who are integrated into the campaign, and also how published adventures are forced to feature generic hooks (since they don’t know your campaign or who your PCs are), but that you can super-charge your campaign by making the hooks specific to your group.
When you start talking about published campaigns, on the other hand — instead of modular scenarios — it seems odd that so many of them are still designed around the bland, generic hooks. The players will be creating characters for this specific campaign, right? So, unlike a modular adventure, a campaign book can absolutely give you and your players guidance on creating characters who will be deeply tied to the campaign.
So it’s very exciting to see Raiders of the Serpent Sea do this in a robust and interactive way.
PLAYABLE RACES
Raiders of the Serpent Sea includes several new playable races.
Beastborn are literally animals who see a humanoid community, become enamored of their lives, and become human themselves in order to experience the lives they see. The book includes 
guidelines for customizing your own beastborn based on any animal, along with prebuilt options for hunter-gatherers, fish, and fowl.
Grims can sort of be thought of as merpeople, but with a distinctly Norse flavor to them. Importantly, they are the native children of Grimnir, their souls touched by the dead demigod who gave their world existence.
Tallfolk are small giants, their origins shrouded in mystery. They are always found as babes on the edges of the forests near Turnfjall, but none are certain who their parents are or why they are abandoned to become foundlings.
Tuss have the blood of the hated Yoten flowing through their veins. They can live their lives as humans — many are not even aware of their secret birthright — but in times of great stress or need, their Yoten blood may reveal itself.
Wicker are tree-golems, created to serve some ancient purpose which has been long-forgotten, even by themselves.
I really like all of these options. I’m probably not doing a great job of capturing the flavor, history, and unique identity that drips off the page here.
In fact, although the book assumes that you’ll be including the standard array of D&D races, I would be strongly tempted to ditch all of that while running Raiders of the Serpent Sea and use only humans and the original races presented here.
CLASS ARCHETYPES
The last big chunk of the Player’s Guide are twelve class archetypes, one for each of the core classes in the Player’s Handbook.
I haven’t personally playtested any of these archetypes, so I can’t be entirely certain how they work in actual play. But, reading through them, I really like that the design seems to be willing to take some BIG swings, which particularly manifests in a willingness to embrace bold, exciting flavor even if it can’t necessarily be nailed down to a convenient, combat-optimized mechanical package.
So you end up with a monk who is the chosen Wanderer, positioned by Fate at the fulcrum of reality. A wolf-riding ranger. Rogues who choose worship the dead god from whose bones the world was forged. Sorcerers who become disconnected from reality, believing that either they or the entire world is an illusion.
And so forth. Just grand, daring concepts that capture the imagination and are backed up with clever unique class abilities.
CONCLUSION
The rest of the Player’s Guide is fleshed out with a medley of interesting stuff:
A surprisingly rich treasure trove for a slim, 80-page volume.
Ultimately, the Raiders of the Serpent Sea Player’s Guide turned me from a skeptic into a believer. It got me excited to read the full campaign, I’m certain it will get players amped up to actually play in the campaign, and it’s easy to imagine it being an erstwhile companion at the table for the duration of the campaign.
GRADE: B+
Designer: Brent Knowles
Additional Writing: Gage Ford, Atlantis Fraess, Carter Knowles, Linden Knowles, Brandon Korolik, Zack Webb
Publisher: Arcanum Worlds
Cost: $8.00 (PDF)
Page Count: 80
In my review of The Shattered Obelisk, I mentioned — among a plethora of other problems — that the book was notable because some of the dungeons and dungeon levels it features aren’t actually keyed. Instead, unnumbered maps of the dungeons are presented, accompanied by a text that describes the various rooms of the dungeon in rambling paragraphs instead of well-organized room keys.
In particular, I pointed out an example from the end of Zorzula’s Rest, where the PCs enter a new level or section of the dungeon called the Indigo Sanctum.
Several people have contacted me to say that I was mistaken. Others have publicly accused me of being a lying liar who lies.
So let’s talk about this a little bit.
People who are wrong on the internet, of course, are a dime a dozen. I don’t have time to respond to everyone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. But I think this is actually a really important issue — for both adventure designers and Dungeon Masters — and I’d hate to see anyone dismissing it due to a misunderstanding: The fact that D&D no longer teaches DMs how to create and run location-crawls has resulted in a lot of DMs struggling to create and run adventures that should actually be really easy for them. That really sucks for those DMs.
Seeing this atrophying of basic adventure design skills crop up in third-party adventures is also bad. And the fact that we’re now seeing the same failures from Wizards of the Coast’s own designers is really worrisome: If the publishers of D&D lose the institutional knowledge for how to design the most basic adventures, this trend will accelerate and be even more difficult to course correct.
Some people tell me this isn’t a big deal because D&D still makes money. Which… yeah, I can’t even really fathom the logic there.
Some people tell me that this isn’t a big deal because D&D isn’t about dungeons any more. And if that was true, sure. I don’t expect Technoir to teach me how to make dungeons, because that’s not what the game is about. If dungeons aren’t relevant to you, go find the scenario structures that are! But you know who does think D&D is still about dungeons? Wizards of the Coast. The Shattered Obelisk features 25+ dungeons.
Some people tell me that I’m just angry that D&D doesn’t feature “old school dungeons” any more. There’s a lot of false assumptions to unpack there, but I think we can boil it down to a simple reality: If you think “put numbers on a map and write a competent room key” is what defines an “old school dungeon,” then you’re really just proving my point that basic adventure design skills are missing in action.
So if we can all accept that “dungeons don’t exist any more, so it’s okay that this dungeon is bad” is both a paradox and a fallacy, maybe we can take a look at what’s actually going on in The Shattered Obelisk.
THE INDIGO SANCTUM
The Indigo Sanctum, as I mentioned is one of three levels in Zorzula’s Rest. You can see the map of the Indigo Sanctum, as it appears on p. 98 of The Shattered Obelisk, above.
And if we were to properly key this map, it would look like this:
Now, the reason I’m supposedly a lying liar who lies is because this isn’t fair: Those aren’t three separate rooms! The Indigo Sanctum is just one big room!
This, however, is exactly why I chose the Indigo Sanctum as my example from the book. It’s not the only dungeon like this in The Shattered Obelisk, but if I showed you the Hardyhammer Mine:
You might say to me, “Well… c’mon, Justin. That’s only two rooms. Do you really need to key them properly?”
Or maybe I show you Marthungrim’s Home:
Sure, now there are four rooms. “But,” you protest, “only two of them are actually described in the text. So are they even really separate rooms?”
And then maybe we’d argue about what actually counts as a “room.” Or maybe you’d want to debate how large a location needs to be before it counts as a “dungeon.” Just all kinds of delightfully irrelevant semantics.
The thing about Zorzula’s Rest, though, is that none of that matters. You can’t tell me it’s a dungeon that shouldn’t be keyed for some reason, because the rest of the dungeon is keyed.
“Ah, ha!” you say. “But we can still argue about whether those are separate rooms!”
Well, if you want. But it’s not an argument you’ll be having with me. It’s an argument you’ll be having with the book. Because you know who else thinks those are separate rooms?
The designer of the adventure.
The Shattered Obelisk explicitly describes Area 2 and Area 3 on my map above as the “Hostage Room” and the “War Room,” respectively. They’re even given inline headings laden with a bunch of relevant details, meaning that it would have take only the slightest amount of effort to excise them from the middle of the big, rambling description of the dungeon level and properly key them instead.
…
This is the bit where I drop the mic.
DUNGEON HOW-TO
The failure to properly execute the dungeons in The Shattered Obelisk, as I said in the original review and as we’ve seen here, is not just some weird confusion over the final level of Zorzula’s Rest. It is a pervasive problem that occurs multiple times throughout the campaign.
Is it a problem that’s going to persist at Wizards of the Coast? Will this become a trend in future adventures, until perhaps we see official products in which no dungeons are properly keyed?
I hope not.
But it’s possible. We’ve already seen this happen in third-party supplements. It seems impossible; but to a gamer in the mid-‘80s it would have seemed equally unbelievable that hex maps would vanish for a generation… and then they did.
What I actually hope is that the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide will be a massive course correction, and we’ll see a full chapter dedicated to teaching new Dungeon Masters how to create and run dungeons. (At this point, I’d even settle for a minor course correction so that the book at least contains an example of a keyed dungeon map.)
Properly keying and running a dungeon is very easy, and that makes it really tempting to dismiss the idea that they’re skills that need to be taught. But the reality is that those are often the most important skills you can teach, because they end up being the foundation on which all the other skills are built.
So let’s keep our fingers crossed that the new Dungeon Master’s Guide is better than the old one; that The Shattered Obelisk is the last time we see Wizards’ designers fail to key their dungeon maps; and that we all get a better foundation on which to build our adventures in the future.
But if not, there’s always So You Want To Be a Game Master.
