Plus some news this week starting with an X-Men and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness theory. And some casting for Blade going on. Plus a big name actor coming to the MCU. Someone who was almost Iron Man is rumored to have a role in an upcoming Marvel movie.

Thank You For Listening

I hope that you are enjoying the podcast. If you are, there are a few ways that you can help support us. First, share the podcast with your friends. Word of mouth is one of the best ways to help the podcast grow. Also subscribe or leave a rating and review. Both of those things keep the podcast higher on the charts and easier to find. You can do that on iTunes, Google Podcast, Stitcher, and Spotify.

We also have a Patreon that you can find here. The funds raised there go to help improve the quality of the podcast as well as the Malts and Meeples YouTube channel and Nerdologists.com website. We have a number of different pledge levels there. Thank you for your support.

Comments or Questions?

Let me know your thoughts on the Morbius trailer. Are you excited to go see it? Do you want it to cross over into the MCU at all?

Let me know your thoughts on that. And let me know what role you’d be okay with Tom Cruise playing in the MCU. If the rumors are true, what would be your ideal casting? You can do that in the comment section below. Or let me know over on twitter. Tweet your thoughts to me @TheScando or with #10MinMarvel.

I’ll see you next time.

Send an Email.
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.
Support us on Patreon here.

The idea for this campaign is clearly the wild west, we’re looking to create something that feels less like high fantasy and more like cattle rustling and duels at high noon. And, borrowing a little bit from the Lord of the Rings, the people mining for gold have dug to deep. And now monsters are pouring out of the mines and troubling the towns and villages out in the wild.

The players can start out with some smaller things, some cattle going missing, accusations and weird occurrences happening down by the mine. I’d almost give it another worldly vibe to it, to borrow a little bit from the board game Shadows of Brimstone.

Now, you have a couple of ways you could go for the bad guys, you have have the mines leading into the underdark and going so deep for some special magical material has caused them to disturb the residents down there and get them to fight back. Or, I think most interestingly, make it the Gith. The reason the Githyanki and Githzerai are more interesting is because you wouldn’t expect them. But they live in a limbo area and almost have a pirate vibe to them, so give them a stagecoach, train robbing vibe and they are out there to get this magical materials that makes magic much more common. Almost an Eberron style where there are trains, people have their wands which is a common weapon that can just sling six charges of something like a six shooter.

So as the players dig deeper they find out that what they thought was happening isn’t actually it. The Githyanki and Githzerai are certainly causing issues as their magical materials are being grabbed from the mine, but what the materials are being used for is now being called into question both by the Githyanki and Githzerai but also by the people who run the mines and give the players a mystery of what is happening there.

This unravels a big conspiracy that leads all the way to some other monster who is the real monstermind behind the mines and who is getting these magical materials in order to invade limbo and take out the Githyanki and Githzerai and make them into mindless drones, in fact, some sort of massive mind flayer would make a lot of sense here as the Gith do not like Mind Flayers.

Finish the campaign with some sort of epic western battle, the mind flayer is coming to town for a showdown at high noon, but the players don’t have a shot with a direct confrontation, so their only hope is to intercept the flayer while they are still on the train. And if you don’t want to do a mind flayer, do something like a vampire or someone who can glamour or mind control their way into the hearts and minds of the people.

That could be where you wrap up the campaign, but now that you’re touching limbo and the outer reaches of the worlds and planes because of the mine, and now that the magical material has such value, you can even have a bigger bad come after it. Maybe while all of this is going down and the players are dealing with the big bad mind flayer or vampire, there’s a cult that suddenly springs up with a charismatic Rakshasa as it’s head who is working on summoning something even more powerful from the outer edges of the multiverse into the world to rule it all and for the Rakshasa to rule under it. So similar feeling to the first part of the campaign, but different in that instead of going out somewhere like the vampire or mind flayer was planning on doing, it’s trying to bring something here, and even if something happens to the Rakshasa, it will be back.

So what do you think about it, is this a campaign that you’d play in or run? What part stands out to you as the most interesting?

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.

For a campaign though, I think that you have to find some lower level monster that seems classic campy horror that starts out harrowing the town that the 0 level or maybe level 1 characters are based out of.

Just as an aside, you might be wondering what a 0 level character is. That is basically that you’re just playing a villager, someone who wants to become a wizard might have a cantrip or two, but no first level spells. The characters probably don’t have anything more than a rusty short sword and a little bit of leather armor at best. Basically, you are really leaning into them launching into being heroes.

Anyways, back to what I’m going for. In the world you’re building these monsters should be normal. The players should know that the scary castle a long way up in the mountains that seems to be always casting a shadow over this town as a monster in it. They should know that the woods has werewolves in it. The creature from the Black Lagoon should be a few towns over, and this is a world that has campy and classic monsters around.

Now, something like this could just be the monster of a week, and while that is going to be good for a little while, eventually I think you should start dropping hints of something or someone bigger controlling everything. You don’t need to use Strahd’s stat block for your vampire lord, it can be lesser than that. I think that it would make sense for a Mummy Lord (or maybe a Lich) to be running this group. They are experimenting with other ways to extend life or something like that, or maybe the bodies are going missing and the Mummy Lord is using the monsters to kill off to create an army of the shambling dead.

I’d play around with whomever your BBEG is, give them some sort of curse. And make that a way either for the players to eventually win by solving the riddles and taking care of the mummy’s curse, or the riddles/curse could just reveal a weakness that the players will be able to exploit. The BBEG should also be very into monologues and having that evil genius mindset, though that might make more sense for an evil wizard in a tower or a lich as compared to a mummy lord, so there are different ways that you can lean into campiness and movie monsters.

What would probably take the most time would be finding those classic monsters you want to use. Some of them don’t fully exist in D&D. However, there are going to be things close, and just reskin them so that they look like what you need at the challenge level you need. And if you wanted to you could also pull in horror movie villains like Freddy Krueger or Jason Vorhees for your game to flesh out the cast of characters. Or you could also steal monsters from things like The Dresden Files and Supernatural to get an idea of how to be a bit campy, but also to use a wide variety of monsters instead of just limiting yourself to the classic movie monsters.

I think that something like this could be interesting for a game personally. It would allow you to pull in the players real knowledge of these things while they have to deal with them in the game. And it wouldn’t have to be a super high level campaign at the end, but you’d get a nice building feeling, especially starting at level 0 and going up.

What do you think? Would you want to play in this game? Have you used classic movie and movie monsters in your games?

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Follow me on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.

Theater of the Mind

With Theater of the Mind, the combat takes place in the peoples heads. If Jane’s Dwarf is charging the Vampire on the far side of the room, there’s nothing physical to represent you getting closer together, you are all just picturing what is looks like in your heads. The chandelier and balcony that might be in the room are also these concepts floating around. And if you need there to be two chandeliers instead of one, you can change that up on the fly.

That’s one of the big advantages of theater of the mind, if the player wants there to be a giant pile of straw beneath the edge of the loft in the barn, there totally can be. If the bad guys are in a tough spot, can they cut a rope and ride up to the ceiling as a chandelier drops to the ground?  You better believe they can do that. Your combat on a mountain can have everything that you want it to have, even surfing down an avalanche fighting the bad guys as you go until the avalanche peters out.

The downside to this is always, the question, are they in range? I really want to cast fireball, are the bad guys in range, how about for magic missile, how about for acid spray? Or someone having a different idea of what it looks like on the battlefield than you do. It’s something that as players and DM’s you have to be flexible and ready to describe what you see the battle looking like so that everyone can get on the same page.

Mini Combat/Tactical Combat

This type of combat takes place on a battle grid/battle map with minis of the monsters and the players so that they know where they are. Basically everything in the room is drawn out on the board. When you are planning out your attacks, you know where everyone is and can discuss strategy more so than you would in theater of the mind because the map is laid out in front of you.

The main advantage to this is that everyone knows precisely where everything is and how close they are to everyone. If they want to cast fireball, the player can see how many monsters they can catch in the blast. Everything in the room is also there so you can describe your actions more clearly if you aren’t great at remembering the details of what the place looked like or aren’t great at adding things on the fly, so it can help spark creativity that way.

The downside is that there are clearly drawn limits on the board. The hayloft that is partly over the barn is hard to have because you can’t see what’s under the hayloft. If there’s only one chandelier on the map, there’s one chandelier on the map. So nothing can be abstracted and if someone wants to try to do something, say run across a table and take a flying dive at a bad guy, it might take them a couple of rounds because that’s what the grids say, so you lose some of the cool moments of the DM being able to say, “You do that, give me a dexterity check to see how it goes.”

Which is Better?

So, I said that either of them is fine at the start of the article, and after writing out my thoughts, I agree with myself still. Either of them is fine, it depends on the group and it depends on the situation. I personally primarily run theater of the mind because I don’t have to come up with anything extra. If there needs to be a combat because someone slapped the king, there’s no rushing to draw a battle map, the combat can just start. However, at the end of Season One of Dungeons and Flagons, we used a battle map and tactical combat. So I can make it work both ways. If I were to suggest something, I’d suggest doing primarily theater of the mind with a little tactical combat thrown in.

The reason I say that is because that makes your big boss battles feel more special. You have this visual aspect that makes that battle feel unique and special as the story winds down. But it also takes a lot of work off of the DM’s plate by having most of it being theater of the mind. When you are drawing a map or building terrain and buying minis it can take a lot of time, a lot of money, or both. Or, in my case, it can take a fair amount of artistic skill that I don’t have (yet).

But it really does come down to your group, maybe your group would have too much trouble wrapping their head around distances in combat if it’s all theater of the mind. I’ve been trying, as I play to set it up better where things are either in range or they aren’t, not to break it down into how many feet someone is away, because that means a whole lot more mental math for me, and I do enough math in real life as it is. Abstracting those things out can bug some players though, so be careful while doing that and know your group.

Do you have a preferred way of combat in D&D? Do you prefer it to be tactical or theater of the mind?

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Follow us on Twitter at @NerdologistCast
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.

I’m taking the vampire from D&D 5e Roll 20 which can be found here.

The first thing we have to do is change it’s weakness. It’s supposed to take damage in the sunlight, but that’s clearly not the case. They just instead, sparkled. Shudder. And to do that, you give them a new trait called ‘Sparkliness’. In this, they now have disadvantage on stealth in the sunlight. Not only that, they also cannot surprise someone when out in sunlight. Oh, vampire wants to sneak up on you during the day, yeah, there’s a beacon from miles away. They can still “hide” in that they can still get partial to  full cover from hiding, but you’ll never, as a player, wonder where the vampire is.

Next, to keep the vampires in proper alignment with the writing level of the book, you have to remove 10 from the intelligence stat. Those aren’t well written books, and while I haven’t actually read a whole one of them, I have seen experts, and I did watch the first movie, so I can say, these vampires are a little bit dumb. Probably drop 5 from wisdom as well, and you got the average Twilight vampire. We’ll leave the charisma alone, because apparently teenage girls still like them.

Finally, build wise, to get the full flavor, we have to look at their charm ability. Like I said above, they have a high charisma, so that means that they should be smooth and charming, but charm isn’t really accurate. It would make more sense to reflavor this ability as brooding. The rest of the ability can stay the same, but whenever you refer to the effect, it shall be known as brooding.

So how do you work this monster into your game?

I would do the satirical version of Curse of Strahd. Make the world as light and happy as possible. The vampire brings the adventurers to this realm so that they can help him find his long lost love. By long lost love, I mean the manic pixie dream girl whom he happened to see in the flower shop next to his massive gothic manor once, a week ago, and has determined that he is madly in love with her. He has a lot of quests for them to go on, once they have found the girl. They have to try and find out what she likes, they have to figure out what type of flowers to get her, they have to find a book of poetry that fits her personality just right because he’s just too brooding and quiet to do any of that on his own. Eventually, things will come to a head and the girl will tell him that she just needs the freedom to be her and that nothing can truly pin her down. Then, the already brooding vampire becomes more brooding, and it affects the weather so that it always raining. Actually, this could just be the history of Strahd that you play before the Curse of Strahd.

Tune in next time for more bad ideas in the Monster Factory. If you have any funny/dumb characters to build that can be used as monsters in your games, feel free to go ahead and send me ideas on Twitter, you can find my information below.

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Follow us on Twitter at @NerdologistCast
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here