The Plot – Solo Leveling

Sung Jinwoo is a hunter. But he isn’t a good hunter, in fact, he is the weakest hunter out there. He needs to do it because he got the power, but also to help support his mother in the hospital and his sister. But, every time he comes back from a hunt, he is always beat up.

This all started when weird portals or gateways started to show up around the world. He and some lucky others were given powers to be hunters. This might mean great at combat or it might mean that they can heal others. Jinwoo just isn’t good at any of them. But when things go wrong in a dungeon, he finds that his life is going to change forever.

What Doesn’t Work?

While this does some different things, I’ll talk about them later, it does feel somewhat derivative of other manga that I’ve read. Technically without it being manga, I believe, since it is South Korean. But the elements there match what I’ve read before. I would say that Lit RPG might even be a better example of what it is doing. And I also compare it to Isekai that I’ve read.

And secondly, what I don’t consider to be a major knock, is that this is violent, at least to more of a level than a lot of manga. Solo Leveling is full color, so blood looks like blood. And there is a lot of violence. More, to me, this is something that if you don’t know it’s going to be there might be a surprise. For the story it is telling it works though.

What Works?

I think that the main character is interesting. His motivations for being in the dungeons, we get to see it in flashbacks, are meaningful. This is the real world, minus the portals and hunters, and he’s doing what he needs to to take care of his family. That feels more real than a lot of characters randomly thrust into another world.

The characters also do real world type things in non-real world type situations. The conversations that they have when they go into the dungeon that kickoff the story aren’t in awe of the dungeon. It is something that is common place in their world. And going on a hunt to clear a dungeon is a job. Conversations around it are normal conversations as people talk about life, love, family, things that normal people talk about.

And I like that it is in color. I’m not sure if this should go here or be in my final thoughts, but it is something that works. The color on the page is nice. It gives it more of that comic feel and I think makes the story that much more immersive. And it isn’t like a page full of color but is used with the blank space on the page, to convey the story really well.

How Does It Compare?

I want to talk about what I compare this to, because it is my normal comic or manga that I read and write about. But it is also different. Thinking about it, I compare it in some ways to something like Blood, Blockade, Battlefront. But the monsters and creatures aren’t coming through. I also compare it to LitRPG’s that I’ve read. There is one where towers appear in the world and now monsters and magic are a thing.

But in terms of manga that I’ve read, I think it does feel different. There is a game like element to it. It does have some of that DNA that you see in things like Sword Art Online. This fantasy element and dungeon clearing element. And there are real life consequences to failure, But they are different. In Sword Art Online, someone dies, and we see them disappear in a game. here, characters address it to the real world immediately. That just adds weight to what the characters are doing.

At the same time, it is about a character leveling up. So while it does feel like there is a bit more weight to it, the basics of it are familiar. Going into a dungeon, fighting, and trying to make a living, survive, and level up, it is what we’ve seen before in a lot of anime or manga. Solo Leveling doesn’t stray too far from the expected tropes.

Final Thoughts on Solo Leveling

Solo Leveling is definitely a comic that I want to keep reading. And it is getting an anime adaptation. I want to read more of the comic and I might even want to read the light novels or LitRPG novels that the comics are based off of.

Like I said in the last section, I think that Solo Leveling, while it is familiar, does feel different. Blood Blockade Battlefront is one that it really does compare to for me. Placing a character into a world where there are real consequences and consequences to the real world feels different.

That does, I do want to see how the main character continues to progress. I think what they’ve done so far makes a lot of sense. I don’t see them leading the character down a dark path, but if they do, it would mess with my enjoyment of the series. The characters reasoning wouldn’t lead that way, but it is hard to tell. And the covers make it feel like it might, at times.

I also hope that it doesn’t just become another, here’s a boss monster, let’s level up this character and make them really powerful. That doesn’t fit with what the story has been thus far either. It should be a struggle for Jinwoo throughout. But because of who he is, and what he needs to do, he can level up and overcome.

Let me know if you’ve read this comic? Is it something that you’re interested in reading or watching the anime of when it comes out? Supposedly coming out in 2023, or is it one you’ll pass on?

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The Game – Sleeping Gods: Dungeons

So of course we are going to talk about the dungeons and how they work in this game. And really, they work mainly the same way that the ship does. With a few changes, of course, so that it feels like it should be an expansion. But it doesn’t make the game more complex than it is without them.

So you lose out on the ship action and the event that happens each day. Now, the event still counts down, comes off the pile, but you don’t do what it says. And when you’re towards the bottom of that event deck, it’s generally a good thing.

But to make up for losing out on the ship action, you get three actions. Those actions can be exploring, moving, or camping. And you don’t need to camp to end the day, but that kind of becomes your ship action type of thing. In that it can help heal up your crew or get rid of fatigue. Though, if you build up too much, you can just always leave the dungeon and wrap up the turn that you were on.

It’s an interesting new thing. There were definitely a number of tokens that were added to the game because of it, but it doesn’t feel like it really increases the complexity of anything.

The Drink

Back to some Scotch last night. This time a Highland Scotch, and a very nice one. I killed off the bottle, which is something that I didn’t talk about but it’s something that you want to do. There’s a mindset that I can have while drinking a good Scotch or Whiskey where I want to savor it, only bring it out on special occasions. But the longer you let it sit, the more the fact it’s been opened, assuming you opened it, the more the flavor will change.

New Content

So, a few things for new content. I talked about it at the start of the stream. I had the opportunity to show off game play for two games that are coming to Kickstarter. One was supposed to be on Tuesday and did launch but they pulled it back because of price point with Aldarra. And the other was playing with the designer of Rogue Angels a scenario of that game on TableTop Simulator. You can find those below.

Aldarra Game Play

Rogue Angels Game Play

And to go with that, I am still, obviously, keeping up with my Sleeping Gods Game Play as well. So look for that again on Wednesday at 8 PM Central. I’m not sure when my next other thing will come out, but I have a game coming to cover as well. But more on that when it gets here.

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All Systems Go

Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons

A new D&D book, Fizban’s is all about dragons. I buy it mainly to get the stat blocks so that I can run even more dragons. But the books generally have solid lore in them as well. And while my Dungeons and Dragons isn’t run in a setting of the game most of the time, knowledge of the lore helps me build out my own worlds for my games.

Marvel Champions – Valkyrie

I believe that she was the most recent one to come out. So, really, no shock that I bought the next small expansion. Thankfully my wallet gets a bit of a reprieve while waiting for Sinister Motives to come out, though that might be coming out soon.

Battlestar Galactica

Yup, this is the grail game that I found, BSG. Now, I own Unfathomable and I probably don’t need to own both. But BSG, I love the theme, even though I thought the new show was just okay. And I know a lot of people who like to play it. Granted, a number of them own it with the expansions, but that’s okay. It’s one that I want to own just because it’s not going to become easier to find. And I will play it once in a while.

Crowdfunding

Astro Knights

Astro Knights, which I wrote about here, is the successor to Aeon’s End. Or a streamlined Aeon’s End, or Aeon’s End in space at least. I didn’t originally plan to back this one on Kickstarter, but the price point is very good. Will it be cheaper in retail, possibly? But I suspect the price with the expansion ends up being the same. And Indie Boards & Cards while not making many things Kickstarter exclusive, does do a few things.

Wine Management

And then there is Wine Management. Wine Management is a print and play roll and write game. And I wouldn’t normally look at them. But I like roll and write games. And printing off some sheets and then laminating them. I backed a D&D related thing, so when I saw this come up, I thought I would give it a try. If I find the game dull or too complex, or whatever, I didn’t spend much on it.

GameNerdz

Sleeping Gods: Dungeons

I would already own this, and I want the other expansion which is more maps, but it’s been hard to find. I don’t know what the Dungeons add, I am assuming just more locations or more story that you can delve into. Maybe more story that is strung together more closely than a lot of what you find the world. But if I can add it in mid game, I will when it shows up.

Thunderworks Games

Roll Player Adventures: Nefras’s Judgement

It’s an expansion to Roll Player Adventures which I want to start playing soon. Nefras’s Judgement adds in more story to the game. 300+ pages of character backstory, backstory boards, trackers, and some new discovery cards.

From what I can tell if it’s going to just add more depth to the characters. When you pick a character, now you get some different backstory quests and story woven around them. I don’t know that it is needed, but I do think it’ll add to the fun of the game.

CoolStuffInc

Atlantis Rising: 2nd Edition

Atlantis Rising is a game that I have wanted for a while. Zee Garcia from the Dice Tower really likes the game. And as a cooperative game fan, I think it looks very cool. Plus the mechanics just make the game seem unique to me. In particular, you can go out to the end of one of the peninsulas of Atlantis, and you’ll do something awesome, unless it sinks. So there is a cool push your luck element to the game. I’m excited to play this one when it comes in.

Set a Watch: Swords and The Coin

And then a solo game, though, technically 1-4. Generally I know about Set a Watch from the solo community. In this game, you are adventurers who go around deal with monsters, but one adventurer is always tending the fire, keeping it lit and keeping a watch. So there are a number of things to keep track of. It’s a solo game so very much interested me to track it down.

Which Is Most Exciting?

I think I’m most excited to get in Nefras’s Judgement. Like I said, I don’t believe that this needed for the game. I do think that it’ll add in some more fun depth for the characters. And it’ll help give characters motivations when playing Roll Player Adventures. Like I’ve said before, when I played, I was a slightly evil sorcerer, so I can add in motivations myself. But having some built in for a character and built into the story and the game, that is going to be fun. I look at Nefras’s Judgement like the Echoes of the Past for Tainted Grail. Is it needed, no, but does it add in something cool, most certainly.

Which would you play first?

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This has also come up in a Discord server that I’m on lately. And I think it’s a good time to talk about how much or how little work you need to do. As a semi-seasoned Dungeon Master, I’m hoping that my experience can help get more people into running Dungeons and Dragons. But also save the effort that so many people put into it.

KISS

Keep it Simple Stupid. We’ve all seen this before, but doing something like creating a campaign can be tricky. And for a lot of gamers and people, there is an idea that you can get it “right”. This is not something that anyone can do. In fact, that is some of the charm of Dungeons and Dragons or an RPG, there isn’t a perfect way to do it. There isn’t a most ideal campaign to run that everyone is going to love. Dungeons and Dragons is a matter of taste.

With that said, don’t over prepare, don’t plan out everything. Your players will not do what you think they will. You want them to go right out of a town to a dungeon, they will go left. You want them to talk to a shop keeper for a clue, they will punch them. They shouldn’t attack an ancient black dragon at level 3, they will. In fact, you can be confident your players will do what they shouldn’t or what you least expect. So don’t over plan.

Three Things For Your First Campaign

While I could give you a lot of things to think about when it comes to a campaign. I want to make my advice follow the KISS methodology as well. So build your world small and out as you go. Know where you want to end the campaign. And only craft situations and scenarios that you need.

Start Small

This is really trap #1 when creating a campaign. I even fall into it at times. I create a whole world and think that I need to flesh out everything. But that is way more than is needed. Firstly, your players won’t go to the whole world. Secondly, you don’t need to know it all now.

In fact, let’s make it even simpler. If you want some rules for creating the world. Draw out a map, mark down 10 things on it, 5 cities, and 5 features. There is your world. Then pick one of those cities, that is where you are starting. Create 5 things of importance in it. One needs to be a tavern and one needs to be a shop. The other three are points of interest. Right down what makes those places interesting. And write down 3-4 NPC (non-player characters) the PC’s (player characters) can find there.

Then with four other points of interest on the map. Write down what makes them interesting and NPC’s who can be found there, again only 3-4. You won’t name shops, or anything like that at those other locations, you are just fleshing out a very little bit. And you have enough to start your campaign at that point.

Know The End

Well, enough world building it is. You do need one more thing. You need to know the end goal. In my Tower of the Gods campaign, that is to make it to the top of the tower. In another campaign I ran, it was to defeat a beholder. Know the end goal, it seems obvious, but a lot of campaigns don’t know the end. Or they come up with the idea of running 20 level campaign and don’t think about how to get there. But knowing the end is important so you have a goal.

Create Situations

Because that goal is what you then use to shape your campaign encounters, both social and combat. It is the lens that you filter the campaign through in such a way that everything, or most everything drives towards that end. But when creating these situations, don’t create them with a specific result in mind. Like I said, building out a dungeon that is to the left when you leave the city and the players head right, that’ll always happen. Attacking a monster they were supposed to talk to, they’ll do that, and then they’ll do the flip. Threating the King instead of making a deal with him, for sure that’ll happen.

In the end, you want the situations and scenarios you create to always move stuff forward. And you want them to feel varied and different. It might be killing the monster, but why are you killing the monster. And monsters will do different things. Social encounters you want some of them to be shaking down someone and some might be at a fancy dinner. But they should all move the story towards the end, or at least the majority should.

And you don’t plan these at the beginning. You shouldn’t need to know every session that far in advance. This is what you plan before each game. This means that you do work for a long time, but it also means that you don’t do so much work that you burn out at the start. It’s doing the work just when you need it.

What Else?

There is a whole lot more that you can do. But the point is that you don’t need to do it. I am trying to give you a simple way to getting your first campaign. Could you build out a world and create every important NPC that you players might run into. Sure, you could. But that isn’t going to be help for getting a game started. In fact, if you try and do that you will never get the game started. There will always be another NPC, another town, another scenario to think of. Instead, KISS and just do what you need, when you need it.

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A dungeon in Dungeons and Dragons is normally seen as a festering hole in the ground, like you’d end up with in classic games. Instead it really is anything where there is an entry point and a goal where you go in and get something or defeat some boss, or to get to a certain location that only the exit can lead you to. Then there are challenges along the way.

You can see how this looser definition makes it much more useful for your game. Your “dungeon” could be going through a section of the underdark in search for another entrance to a “dungeon” on the surface that then the players will still have to go through. So your dungeon could literally be leading to another dungeon and that works well.

Your dungeon could be the gauntlet of challenges at the end of a campaign that lead up to the big bad monster who your party has been going after the whole time. Or it could be two rooms leading up to that big bad, but it’s a point of entry. I think something even as simple as a foyer in a manor and then two paths leading to two waiting rooms and then a waiting room to the main hall where the big bad Emperor of the Frozen Realm sits works for a dungeon. You’ve given yourself a chance for some combat, you’ve possibly, if you want one direction to be better, added in a riddle or a puzzle for the players to figure out.

I’ve given some examples of what different dungeons are, but that only shows what some dungeons might be, but not why you’d want to use a dungeon.

A dungeon is nice for the DM, because it gives you a fairly straight forward session or sessions to plan. Your players are always going to do something that you wouldn’t expect, always, but in a dungeon, because you’ve already planned it a fair amount, it’s not going to be as difficult to deal with those random things. This means that you’ll have less on your plate to come up with things on the fly, and have planned encounters in more detail than you normally would have. It also means, that if you’re partly in and the session comes to the end, you already have some plans for the next session.

Also, because of the planning you can do ahead of time, this is something that you can tweak slightly and move to another game at a later time. There are plenty of monsters in the monster manual that you can reskin it to. If the first game is more classic fighting goblins, looting treasure, kicking down doors, you can create a dungeon to put them in to get to the big bad. Maybe, now you are running an elemental campaign. Now you can swap out the goblins with elemental creatures, raise the challenge level of your game and raise the difficulty of your traps and use the exact same dungeon set-up. Just with reflavoring how you describe things and what monsters are in the dungeon, you now have a very different dungeon.

Beyond making things easier on the DM, they also offer a chance for variety and world building in your world. If you need to drop bits of history to the players and don’t want to just run a session where they are in the library getting talked at by the librarian, a dungeon is a great way to go. Now they are going to kick out some goblins, or so they think, but it’s going to be a chance for you as the DM to sprinkle in some knowledge of the ancient world that will matter for the players later, while they are still getting to do something.

It also allows for making really unique pieces for the players to play through. And I don’t mean setting up some big map with minis that the players get to look at and ooh and ah over, unless you can do that (I can’t). But it allows you to create the mad wizards tower that the players have to fight their way up. It allows you to do a crazy underdark/Mind Flayer story or the maze of a Beholder. These places are going to be places that will be remembered by players and a chance for cool and crazy moments to happen that players will talk about for a long time afterwards. For me, creating those moments is something that I want to get better at, and a dungeon and planning on dungeon are a good way to do that.

Finally, I think it’s a good time to use dungeons as benchmarks in your story. So, if you’re a player, you might suspect this, but most DM’s don’t have the whole story planned out before they get started. We have a beginning, maybe, and an end, most likely. If nothing else, we have a concept for the game and an idea of who the big bad is for the game. But sometimes we have ideas where we know we want, around level five, this thing to happen to move the story forward, and at level ten, this other thing. Making those benchmark spots into dungeons really lets you move the story from one spot to the next arc of your story as it leads up to your big bad. And when you don’t think of a dungeon as a festering hole in the ground, now all of a sudden you have a lot more options.

So what do you think? Do you think that there are good reasons to use dungeons? Do dungeons feel too focused for you or too much like a railroad for you?

This wraps up the Welcome to the Dungeon! series. Let me know what you thought about the series as a whole?

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Yes!

I wanted to talk about one half of Dungeons and Dragons, and that is the dungeon. I haven’t talked about dragons yet either, but that will be some time later. Instead, I wanted to talk about how you can build interesting dungeons in your D&D game if you want to use them. Dungeons aren’t something that I use that often, or at least what would be considered a dungeon traditionally.

So let’s define what a “dungeon” is for the sake of this article.

A Dungeon is any sort of building or location where the players need to get through it by progressing forward, either to a goal or an exit.

So that might seem wrong to you, you’re thinking of some labyrinth hidden deep under the ground in some remote area that has been long forgotten. That certainly is a dungeon, but a mad wizards tower climbing high into the air is a dungeon. A Minotaur’s labyrinth is also a dungeon. It could be the ruins of a city on the surface, or a druids grove that they’ve grown up to protect them.

All of these options really do want you to move forward or are likely to have something that you want at the end. You’re going to have to fight through monsters and deal with traps.

Let’s also talk some about what dungeons aren’t?

Dungeons aren’t a static thing. The old school dungeon was a collection of monsters and traps thrown together to create a challenge for the players. You’d have an orc in one room, a bugbear and some goblins in another room, a handful of drow the level down in the dungeon with a bunch of random traps and puzzles thrown in the middle of them.

Instead, Dungeons are living locations. While the current inhabitants might not be the original builders of the Dungeon, there is going to be a reason for the monsters to be there. Maybe there are goblins living on the upper levels, and some drow on the bottom levels of the dungeon, but they aren’t going to be living in rooms next to each other, they’d have killed each other. So maybe they would split up floors of a dungeon, leaving buffers between them. The same way, it’s going to have traps or puzzles, have the monsters figured out how to deal with them, or do they just avoid the section that has managed to squish members of the goblin tribe, so it makes where the trap is obvious to adventurers?

Dungeons also aren’t there for no reason. Someone has built them, so they are going to have had an original purpose, which might be the same purpose as of now, but there was a reason. So there also has to be a reason why it is like it is now. But if you’re going to put a random wizard tower deep into the forest, there are going to be stories and legends about this place and a reason the wizard put it there for a reason.

So now that we’re all on the same page as to what a Dungeon is, let’s talk about what is going to come up after this?

We’re going to talk about the ecosystem of your dungeon and why that matters.

We’re going to talk about using puzzles in your dungeon and what that might do to a dungeon.

We’re going to talk about how traps work, and how you avoid bogging down your dungeon with traps.

We’re going to talk about why you’d use a dungeon in your game.

So join me in those upcoming articles as you think about building a dungeon for your game of Dungeons and Dragons.

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