[00:00:00] Speaker A: RPG Lessons Learned. When the game is over, when your players are gone, that's when lessons are learned.
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[00:00:24] Speaker B: What's up, everybody? Good evening, and welcome to RPG Lessons Learned, the show where you can learn from our mistakes. I am your co host, Tanner, and I'm here with your main host, Dusty. Dusty. What's good, man?
[00:00:36] Speaker A: Everything's good, Tanner. Why m. Am I the main host? You can be the main host, too.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: It's your show. It's your show. You. You're the one who crafted it. And, um, you know, you.
[00:00:45] Speaker A: You.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: You rotate through co hosts like it's nothing. I'm just the next guy in line, and someday I'll be gone and you'll keep running it. No, it's fine. We're both co hosts.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Maybe I'll be gone and I'll hand it off to you. Who knows?
[00:00:56] Speaker B: I imagine you're like the Conan, and I'm the, uh, not the barbarian.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Sutine.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: Yeah, you're calling it. I'm Suitai. I'll take that.
We are here to talk about a game that you ran for, um, your daughter and her friends.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: Yes, indeed.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: Playing with the younglings again. And you finally got to scratch a game off your bucket list. I guess it's not scratched off totally because you haven't finished it, but you had been wanting to run Neverland for so long, man.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: Yes, Neverland, by Andrew Kolb. K O L B. If you're not familiar with the game, look it up. It is lovely. It's a hex crawl of Neverland, about 50, 60 years after the darling children had their adventure in the classic Peter Pan and Wendy book.
[00:01:49] Speaker B: So I must admit, I have not read Peter, Peter Pan.
I have seen the movie, but when I was a young kid in the 90s, there were some Disney VHS as we had, and some we didn't. So, like, I never had, like, Hercules, but I had Mulan, and I had Lion King, but I never had Peter Pan. So I've seen the movie a couple times, but I'm not super intimately familiar with the setting or anything like that. So don't feel like you're over explaining if you want to explain why something is cool or not.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: So continue. Yeah, if you've seen the movie, uh, I think the movie does a pretty good job. The movie doesn't portray how sinister Peter can be.
Even J.M. barrie himself, who wrote the books, said of one of the Statues that were, that was made of Peter Pan during his life, that it didn't portray the devil in Peter, um, very well. So there very much is some devil, some mischief in Peter. Um, although I have to say, the classic Peter Pan cartoon, Walt Disney cartoon. There are scenes where he's smiling, where if you freeze frame it, it's very dev. English face.
[00:02:53] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean it's always. That's kind of the fun of Fae adventures, right? That they're pernicious and they're mischievous and they're fun. But there is a dark edge to, to any of it. So.
[00:03:05] Speaker A: Yep. Uh, and we always know controversies, brief, brief controversy noted about JM Barry and uh, the relationship he had with the real life inspiration for Peter. We'll, we'll never know the true nature of that relationship. Uh, certainly there are things to give one pause, but all these people are long dead and gone and certainly the myth of Peter Pan remains. So controversy noted. Moving on.
[00:03:30] Speaker B: So you are such a big fan of this author that you wanted to run this adventure.
[00:03:35] Speaker A: By this author, you mean Andrew Kolb?
[00:03:37] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, sure, that's what I meant.
[00:03:38] Speaker A: Uh, no.
[00:03:40] Speaker B: So I remember you talking to me about this years ago, that you got this awesome hex crawl and you're like, tanner, I made these hexagonal tiles. I painted them. I have a little wheel that I can spin to tell you when it's day and night because the map changes, changes and this and that. And then I hadn't heard anything about it for about three or four years.
[00:03:59] Speaker A: Yeah, this was one of my pandemic activities as I, I bought these, these wooden hexagons and I spent a good part of the pandemic like drawing on them and painting them and assembling this hex map and putting magnets the back of them and like a metal panel and some wood and yada, yada, yada. Like I crafted this thing. It took me like probably a hundred hours of work. Oh my God, the hexagon map.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: And now you finally got to use it.
[00:04:24] Speaker A: And now it's been sitting in my office for like five years now. Can you believe the pandemic was five years ago?
[00:04:30] Speaker B: Oh, I'm just trying to wrap my head around this. So yeah, you made this awesome, awesome prop. And you've had it sitting, sitting around for a long time.
And I remember the last time we checked in with your family game, you said to your daughter and her group, hey, the next time you guys want to play, you're going to have to run something. I did, you backed down I did. You gave up. What did you just see? A chance to bring this to the table finally. And you're like, I gotta take it. Or did they. Were they hemming and hawing about stuff?
[00:05:02] Speaker A: I really want the next generation to dm. Um, I really want them to run games. And here's what's happened. They are just not with each other. One of the kids has gone and is now running a game for a different group of friends at her lunch table.
[00:05:18] Speaker B: Oh, awesome.
[00:05:19] Speaker A: And is, like, telling my daughter about it, who tells me about it. And then another one of Margo's friends. M. Margot's. My daughter at this table is, like, writing adventures and, like, running them for her family.
[00:05:32] Speaker B: That's sick. That's awesome.
[00:05:33] Speaker A: So they are GMing. They're just not GMing with each other.
Um, and they have been asking to play another game with me.
I don't know. They want someone more experienced running for them that they can, I guess, learn from versus running for each other. So they have access to an adult who is willing to, um, share some different ways to play dd, like this Hex crawl. And they are asking for it. So, you know what? Fine. Fair enough. And I am running for Margot and her friends again.
[00:06:07] Speaker B: So they have not played in a hex crawl. Correct. You've done hex dungeons for them, but this is the first sort of outdoor, um, regional adventure.
[00:06:16] Speaker A: That's right. We've done a point crawl. That was our very first adventure.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: And you hate those. Ah.
[00:06:20] Speaker A: Uh, I wouldn't say hate. I mean, I ran. It was Dusk. Dusk was our first adventure. I ran that as a point crawl. We ran Dusk, and then we did several hex dungeons. And yes, now we are doing this hex crawl. And what's genius about this hex crawl is, like many hex crawls, there's no story, there's no plot. And every time you enter a hex, every hex has its own page in this book by Andrew Kolb. And you roll what happens, and you roll what they find.
And they might never encounter. Are you good with spoilers?
[00:06:54] Speaker B: Captain Hook, I assume, is around.
[00:06:55] Speaker A: Well, sure. Um, they might never encounter Captain Hook. They might never encounter Peter Pan. They might never encounter the Lost Boys, but they also might. And the more time they spend, you know, the more probable it is that it comes up in a roll. And certainly people will mention Captain Hook and mention Peter Pan as they encounter mermaids and pirates and giant spiders. Um, but I love how random it is. And I made it clear to them because we started like, hey, this is a different type. This is not a dungeon with, like, a finite whatever. You might not visit every hex before you achieve your mission of getting off this island. Right.
[00:07:28] Speaker B: They're free to explore as much as they want. And don't feel bad about leaving content behind. Yeah.
[00:07:33] Speaker A: I was like, hey, there's at least five ways off the island that I can think of off the top of my head. You can probably come up with more. Your goal is to leave this island. You don't have to go everywhere. Even if you do go everywhere, you are not going to find everything. Everything. I held up the book and I was like, this book is thick. If we uncovered every piece of content in this book, you would be bored to tears, and we'd be playing this game for a year, and nobody wants that.
[00:07:55] Speaker B: Do they seem excited about that?
[00:07:56] Speaker A: They were when I was like, hey, play this thing like real life. Be goal oriented. Leave stuff behind and just try to make progress in what you want to do. And they really seemed to glom onto that and enjoy that.
[00:08:08] Speaker B: That's awesome, man. Um, you still playing in bfrpg?
[00:08:11] Speaker A: We are. Um. We are. Let's just leave it at that. I don't think the kids would be interested in learning a new system, although I think they're not.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: Like, I. I would expect that the young people today are totally D D, 5E programmed. That would be my expectation. It seems like you've done some counter programming, or as they like to call it today, parenting to make sure that they play bfrpg. But have you had to entertain any questions of why aren't we playing this in 5e?
[00:08:41] Speaker A: Not at all. Not in the slightest. They're all.
[00:08:44] Speaker B: What games are they running for their friends, I wonder?
[00:08:46] Speaker A: Bfrpg. Really? Yes. Because I gave them all free copies of.
[00:08:50] Speaker B: Oh, man, you're starting a weird little scene here.
[00:08:52] Speaker A: I am. I know. Uh, well, here's the thing. BFRPG is very cheap. 5. Uh, E is not. So I don't want to ask these kids and their parents to go drop 50 bucks on a player's handbook and then 150 bucks on a player's handbook, monster manual and DMG if they want to run the game. And I also don't love 5e myself.
[00:09:13] Speaker B: No. Uh, we've talked about 5e and how wizards of the coast sucks. I was just curious because that is. My perception is that is what the culture is, especially for players younger than us.
[00:09:23] Speaker A: But. Yeah. No. And when I. When I told them this is closer to what they're playing in Stranger Things they were like, okay, yeah, great. Now they are interested in playing something that has more classes and more races. Because BFRPG has four classes, four races. That's it.
[00:09:36] Speaker B: There haven't been like supplement books for bfrpg.
[00:09:39] Speaker A: There are supplements that you can download.
There are books you can buy that are either adventures or monster books or equipment books or NPC books. But there, there is nothing you can, you can.
[00:09:50] Speaker B: They're all third party stuff, right? No, no, no, they are.
[00:09:53] Speaker A: They're official.
[00:09:54] Speaker B: The only printed stuff is the core.
[00:09:56] Speaker A: Well no, the core. This stuff I'm talking about is printed. Like there's a ton of printed stuff you can get on Lulu and Amazon. But all of it is like adventures and equipment and monsters and NPCs. None of it is extra classes. Now on the website you can download extra classes.
You can download a ranger, a barbarian, et cetera. Um, I don't really want to get into that. I think what I'm going to do is they want to run something with more options.
Mhm. I think I'm going to figure out another OSR game to run. It's either going to be old school essentials with lots and lots of options or Castles and Crusades, which is my favorite D20 game aside from BFR. Well, they're both my favorites. We talked about that before. It'll probably be Castles and Crusades and I mean you can see the bookshelves behind me. I actually have extra copies of the Player's Handbook that are older versions, um, that I would be willing to like loan the kids for them to go create their own characters. So we might branch out into Castles and Crusades.
[00:10:51] Speaker B: Crazy that you forgot to mention the Tan hack, the number one bestselling, um, thing now available at the Crystal Mod Itch IO but you know what, it's, it's fine, it's fine.
[00:10:59] Speaker A: It's. It's in transit related to the conversation we're just having. It's weird. They don't seem interested in rules, light.
[00:11:05] Speaker B: Stuff that kind of tracks where, where I was at when I.
[00:11:09] Speaker A: How.
[00:11:10] Speaker B: How old are they?
[00:11:10] Speaker A: Like, uh, the youngest is 11. They are uh, maybe the youngest is 12 now for the most part they're 13 and the oldest two are both 14.
[00:11:20] Speaker B: That, that's about the age that I was probably 12 when I first started playing D and D. And to me I really found uh. And uh, this was during the 3.5 era, so Lord knows there was a lot of fiddly rules. But, but that was like part of the fun was like Understanding and mastering the. When you get these plus twos and when you don't get these plus two. So that doesn't surprise me. I think the tendency to go more rules light is definitely like, uh, you've played a lot of RPGs type of thing, and so it doesn't immensely surprise me. Um, I want to go back to this, um, arts and crafts, though. Sorry, I kind of.
We got away from that. So you. Did you have a real boat when you ran terror on the guitar? Oh, yeah. Remember this? Okay.
[00:12:06] Speaker A: I could go grab it. It's. It's right. It's right there.
[00:12:09] Speaker B: Um, I have never been a GM who likes having.
In my words, this. This is a great piece of work. If I were to make it. I'm not a GM who likes having crap on the table, I would say, because anything I produce, like, I'm already. We already have so many books and pages and drinks and snacks and dice and stuff. Like, I have never been a crafty GM in terms of physical props or miniatures or dungeon terrain. I mean, we had a Chessex wet erase mat, and that's where we did 95% of our stuff. I've never made props. I've never. Or, uh, I've made handouts before. Like, stuff I can have in a folder and be like, this is a note or a map that you got. What is the drive for you to do the arts and crafts part of the hobby? Because that's something. I feel like I'm really ignorant to variety.
[00:12:58] Speaker A: I don't do it for every game. And for the most part, like you said, there's a lot of crap on the table. And for the most part, three of the five or six adventures that I've run for these kids have been hex dungeons, where they each have in front of them a character sheet and a blank hex map that they're taking notes on.
And that's very manageable. So I don't frequently put props in front of them.
Uh, in fact, the last game we played, I had a note.
And on that note, I had written in some commercially available invisible ink markers that are UV reactive. And then I handed them a UV flashlight when they finally cast detect magic on it. So I've done little. Little things like that.
[00:13:39] Speaker B: And you've been going through reams of flash paper, right?
[00:13:41] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely.
[00:13:43] Speaker B: Love throwing fireballs.
[00:13:44] Speaker A: Love xdm. Um, love flash paper. Love doing sleight of hand at the table. I don't.
Variety, man. Uh, when I ran for the guys way back in the day, in my first foray campaign, for the most part, we ran using the poster maps that came with the adventures. But then for that one adventure, I built the tavern out of foam core board. And I built. I glued all the zombies to it and it was surrounded by zombies and they had to fight there. Every so often, I want to go big with a crazy prop. And I will say, as the kids walked in and saw the table and saw the flipped over blank hexes, because you got to flip them over to reveal what's on it.
[00:14:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:19] Speaker A: As they walked in and saw, you know, these 24 black hexes that were numbered and the giant wheel of the clock with all the wood burning that I had done on the clock, there were reactions of, oh, like, what are we in for? This seems fun.
[00:14:34] Speaker B: And that's what you do it for, right?
[00:14:35] Speaker A: Yeah. But also for variety. I don't want every game to be filling in a blank hex dungeon.
[00:14:40] Speaker B: But this book, you were so enamored with it for so long. I think it's awesome that you made it not only special for, uh, the players, but special for yourself, too. Like, there's so many. I think part of being an adult is realizing that, like, you do have a. I don't want to get morbid. You have a finite number of really fun things in your life.
It's why you go out to your favorite restaurant, uh, for your birthday. It's why you take the time to make sure everything is just right for when you go grill outside or something like that. Like, the idea is that you're trying to maximize the amount of fun that you're going to have. And to do that, you know, you've put all this arts and crafts work in it, granted, years ago. But, like, it is part of the fun for you to be able to make this, like, as best as it can be.
[00:15:33] Speaker A: Right? It really is. Yeah. And for different games to feel different, therefore, they stand out in their memories.
[00:15:40] Speaker B: Absolutely. Any, um, fun anecdotes or anything, uh, cool that they got up to in the adventure that you want to talk about?
[00:15:47] Speaker A: Um, spoiler alert.
Uh, they met. They met Michael Darling, and the Darling children are still here. And I hope I'm Only speaking to GMs who are going to run this adventure. I hope my very brief. Spoiler alert.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: Actually, players don't listen to podcast. We've.
[00:16:02] Speaker A: Yeah, probably not. They met Michael Darling and he introduced himself as Michael and they're talking to him and they, they figured out who he was and then they policed themselves and they're like, wait, Wait, wait, wait. We know who Michael Darling is. Our characters have no idea.
[00:16:18] Speaker B: That's fun.
[00:16:20] Speaker A: So watching them kind of self police metagaming was great.
Uh, the kids faces melting when they saw the hexagons were great. Oh, you know what a high watermark was for me, that had nothing to do with the graphs. One of the kids had dice, and they were bouncy. And I was like, are those rubber dice? And he was like, oh, they're silicon. And I'm like, where did you get those? Because as far as I knew, the only dice the kids had were what Margo and I had gone and, like, bought for them.
They've literally all gone out and bought their own dice. Yes.
[00:16:48] Speaker B: They're in. That's awesome.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: That was. That was a fun moment from the last game.
[00:16:53] Speaker B: That's so cool.
[00:16:54] Speaker A: Oh, uh. As the crocodile patrols around the island, I would move that little. I'd move a little aquarium stone around the map. And at first they're like, what is that? And I'm like, you don't know. And finally. And they were killing themselves because they're like, we don't. We don't know this is happening. So we can't purposely go to a hex that's going to pass by, so we have to ignore it. And they're. Every time I move it, they're all watching it, but they're also trying to be good and not medicate. And finally, through pure happenstance, it passed by and they saw it was the crocodile. They were very excited. They had theorized that it might be the crocodile, and they were beyond delighted to discover that it was, in fact, the crocodile of Neverland.
[00:17:35] Speaker B: That's really fun, but no, uh, a.
[00:17:37] Speaker A: Ton of good standout moments.
[00:17:39] Speaker B: That's so cool, man. It looks like you flipped over maybe half the tiles here. Do you think it's going to last another session or two or.
[00:17:45] Speaker A: I do. And I think the first session, like, they spent probably half an hour on the first tile because they were still trying to maximize a little bit and, like, do everything they could in that tile. And like, no, no, no, no. You got to move on.
And they got into the groove of just kind of being on the island, going from place to place. I think they get in the groove faster. I think this could be done in a session, maybe like a session and a half, which is always tough because I got to figure out, like, where.
[00:18:11] Speaker B: The stopping point is.
[00:18:11] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. What's it look like if after the next session, I think there's only like an hour of Content, like, how do you, how do you plan that game?
[00:18:18] Speaker B: Yeah. Do you feel like you've gotten your monies and, and time's, uh, worth out of the prep and stuff that you've done? Is this, is this bucket list worthy game you think it is?
[00:18:29] Speaker A: I mean, I got, I enjoyed reading the book so much that, frankly, just making the map was a reward unto itself. If I never got to run it, I wouldn't say I'd die happy, but I would die fine with it.
[00:18:38] Speaker B: Yeah, that would be your number one regret on the deathbed.
[00:18:41] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. But crafting this map was its own reward, getting to use it as a delight. I think to really recoup the time investment, I need to run it like four or five times. But running it even, even once has been a lot of fun.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: Awesome. Awesome. Well, I'm really curious to see what the, uh, the final impression is once they, Once, uh, they get through it. And, um, I want to know how you feel about it once you're done. So any lessons you want to take away from this as far as, um, investment or running for kids or.
[00:19:11] Speaker A: I'd say don't be afraid to put crap on the table.
[00:19:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:14] Speaker A: Not. Not every game.
And if making the crap is its own reward and you can be Zen about them not engaging with it, then it's probably worthwhile.
But every so often, change up your game. I think we keep talking about how variety is the spice of life in gaming, and it just keeps being true and changing it. There's a lot to be said for changing it up.
[00:19:36] Speaker B: Yep. I think my aversion, uh, to it comes from the fact that I was for so long, it was really rough on me to have content that I created that never got used. And for me, a giant physical prop is like the number one thing that that could be that, you know, that would be like the ultimate, you know, if it's for a map for a specific game and you know it's going to be part of the game. I think that's really cool, man.
[00:20:01] Speaker A: When I'm done running this game, I'm going to hang that on the wall in my study because again, they're all magnetized so tiles won't fall off and it will just be on my wall.
[00:20:10] Speaker B: Another fond memory on the wall. Yeah. That's awesome. Well, give me an update next time. I want to see how it turned out.
[00:20:15] Speaker A: We'll do.
[00:20:16] Speaker B: All righty. Take it easy, everybody.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: People call them reviews, postmortems, retrospectives.
We call them lessons learned. And we're sharing ours with you.
