Cockatrice Nuggets #57 - show notes

Cockatrice Nuggets #57 - Midgard recap and D&D Essentials Kit - show notes
Published on July 1, 2019

world anvil summer camp
D&D Essentials
Watch my WA Summer Camp progress


#dndessentialskit #dnd #ttrpg #anchorcast #podcast

Where have I been?

I've taken anunplannedan unplanned break in writting. I continue to update my WA page and release podcasts, but my zine focus has been lost. I feel like it is imposter syndromsyndrome creeping in and I am now trying to fight it. My next planned release is an NPC pamphlet zine, I have four placed in WA, but not written out. I've linked my gol for WA Summer Camp above as I think it's relevant to the direction I am heading. If you want to follow my world there you will be able to see the progress I make throughout July and all of that will filter down into my future zines.

Progress continues, albeit slowly. I am aware of my insecurities and am working my way through the feeling.

https://www.worldanvil.com/w/irillen-jerry247/a/goals---summer-camp-2019-prompt-1-article

Cockatrice Nuggets #55 show notes

Episode 55
Published on 6.11.2019 Where I talk about Campaign Managment and recap my Midgard Dungeons and Dragons campaign.

https://anchor.fm/rich-fraser 

#e3 #dnd #ttrpg #anchorcast #podcast 

World Anvil
Obsidion Portal
Scabard
City of Brass
Gimp
Silent Titans Session Zero
Session Zero Reddit link
Silent Titans



Thanks for listening! As always you can find me on Patreon, Blogger, Anchor, and the various socials; , Twitter, < href="https://discord.gg/z3c4yeH"Audio DungeonDiscord and I have a room at Tenkar's Tavern Discord. Hope to see you there!


Review on Itunes.


Follow along with my campaign:
Midgard map
Midgard Setting Books
World Anvil City of Zobeck
Word Anvil Silent Titans
House Rules

Cockatrice Nuggets #54 - Hexes, titans, and session zero

show notes

Episode 54

Published on 5/30/2019

Where I talk about my groups and what I've been up to in Dungeons and Dragons and now Into the Odd

#GoT #dnd #ttrpg #anchorcast #podcast

excel sheet

xnathar's on dndbeyond

donjon.bin/sh

Tome of beasts

creature codex

d30 sandbox

Tome of adventure design

castle oldskull

hot springs island

silent titans

uvg

into the odd

acks

swords and wizardry

zobeck session zero slideshow

xcard

lines and veils

 Thanks for listening! As always you can find me on Patreon, Blogger, Anchor, and the various socials; Facebook, Twitter, Audio Dungeon Discord and I have a room at Tenkar's Tavern Discord. Hope to see you there!

Review on Itunes.

Follow along with my campaign:

Midgard map

Midgard Setting Books

World Anvil

House Rules

Cockatrice Nuggets Episode 53 - Many prairie dogs died for this information

Cockatrice Nuggets #53 show notes

Published on 5/24/2019

Where I try to justify hitting my Dungeons and Dragons players with pot shots from a sling.

Tales of the Old Margreve

Burrowling

Thanks for listening! As always you can find me on Patreon, Blogger, Anchor, and the various socials; Facebook, Twitter, Audio Dungeon Discord and I have a room at Tenkar's Tavern Discord. Hope to see you there!

Review on Itunes.

Follow along with my campaign:

Midgard map

Midgard Setting Books

World Anvil

House Rules

#avengers #dnd #ttrpg #anchorcast #podcast

What have I been up to?

Excel, Excel, Excel. I feel like I'm playing a video game, I look up and I spent 4 hours and my pot of coffee is cold! I feel like, aside from a few tweaks, I am done. I'm going to look into how I can release this, but I'm sure there is not a way. I used d30 sandbox, Tome of Adventure Design and Xanathar's Guide to Everything. Compiled and tweaked, made some tables and formulas, and finished a quick hex populator. I would like to eliminate duplicates and maybe add more lines, but it works pretty well. I connected the moster encounter table generator I made and I've got a quick hex at the press (or two) of F9. Wanna try it? Its ugly, but made to paste into my hex page in onenote. Let me know what you think.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/27108636

Cockatrice Nuggets #52 5E D&D what I hate and what I love show notes

Cockatrice Nuggets #52 5E D&D what I hate and what I love

Episode 52

Published on 5/8/2019

5th edition Dungeons and Dragons likes and dislikes and call ins!

https://anchor.fm/rich-fraser/episodes/Cockatrice-Nuggets-52-5E-DD-what-I-hate-and-what-I-love-e3u4h2

Aron from Keep It Simple

Colin Green from Spikepit

https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=15429922

Frothsof from Thought Eater

frothsofdnd.blogspot.com
www.patreon.com/thoughteater

Thanks for listening! As always you can find me on Patreon, Blogger, Anchor, and the various socials; Facebook, Twitter, Audio Dungeon Discord and I have a room at Tenkar's Tavern Discord. Hope to see you there!

Review on Itunes.

Follow along with my campaign:

Midgard map

Midgard Setting Books

World Anvil

House Rules

#avengers #dnd #ttrpg #anchorcast #podcast

Cockatrice Nuggets #51 Prep and Recap show notes

Episode 51 

Published on May 2, 2019

Where I talk recap and prep for my next Midgard Dungeons and Dragons session

https://anchor.fm/rich-fraser/episodes/Cockatrice-Nuggets-51-Prep-and-Recap-show-notes-e3tav7

Loopy planning
No article on my hex population, maybe in the future!

Thanks for listening! As always you can find me on Patreon, Blogger, Anchor, and the various socials; Facebook, Twitter, Audio Dungeon Discord and I have a room at Tenkar's Tavern Discord. Hope to see you there!

Review on Itunes.

Follow along with my campaign:

Midgard map

Midgard Setting Books

World Anvil

House Rules

#avengers #dnd #ttrpg #anchorcast #podcast

one page dungeon

remember this?

https://www.slackernerds.com/2019/02/five-room-dungeon-tables.html

the monastery has been stewing around in my head. I had all but forgotten about the one page dungeon contest I wanted to enter this year. Three hours later... 

You can get the pdf if you join my patreon.

New nuggets #49 call in episode for Avengers day!

https://anchor.fm/rich-fraser/episodes/49---Avengers-day--no-spoilers-DD-podcast-e3rvet

#avengers #dnd #ttrpg #anchorcast #podcast

Thanks for listening! As always you can find me on Patreon, Blogger, Anchor, and the various socials; Facebook, Twitter, Audio Dungeon Discord and I have a room at Tenkar's Tavern Discord. Hope to see you there!

Review on Itunes.

Follow along with my campaign:

Midgard map
Midgard Setting Books
World Anvil
House Rules

Cockatrice Nuggets #48 D&D midgard campaign prep show notes

Episode 48 

Published on April 23, 2019

Where I discuss preparing for my current Dungeons and Dragons midgard campaign

Listen to Spikepit on anchor.fm

dndbeyond

5th edition character sheet app

Weather table on patreon

Encounter Tables on blogger

Thanks for listening! As always you can find me on Patreon, Blogger, Anchor, and the various socials; Facebook, Twitter, Audio Dungeon Discord and I have a room at Tenkar's Tavern Discord. Hope to see you there!

Review on Itunes.

Follow along with my campaign:

Midgard map

Midgard Setting Books

World Anvil

House Rules

Cockatrice Nuggets #47 show notes

Episode 47
Published on April 15, 2019
Something old, something new Dungeons and Dragons version
Listen to Plundergrounds on Anchor: https://anchor.fm/plundergrounds

Old - castle oldskull generators
New - courts of shadow Fey
Borrowed - encumbrance rules
Blue - The-Ultraviolet-Grasslands--Free-Introduction

Thanks for listening! As always you can find me on Patreon, Blogger, Anchor, and the various socials; Facebook, Twitter, Audio Dungeon Discord and I have a room at Tenkar's Tavern Discord. Hope to see you there!


Review on Itunes.
Follow along with my campaign:


Midgard map
Midgard Setting Books
World Anvil
House Rules

More on hexcrawling (part 2)

Part one here.

I got to use my traces/tracks/spoor/monster/lair table for encounters this week and found out it doesnt work for hex crawling. If you recall, I was rolling every four hours and cleared the encounter track every night. That means I need six (remember there are 2 traces) out of six dice to come up as successes. Why didn't I figure this out? Why didn't you tell me! Well, that's what playtesting is for, my players got off easy!
Ok, we have two options here, decrease the DC or shorten the encounter track. Either should work, but which is better? I want an encounter once every few days, let's say twenty five percent chance per day. If I were rolling one d20 I would set a DC 15, as each increment of a d20 is one twentieth of one hundred, or five percent. Looking at anydice 6d20 output, 72+ is about 25% so I'm guessing a DC of 12 without any fancy probability math. Is there a website that will do that for me? To google!

Lowering the DC means I still need 6 successes. Or I could use a range. Probably based off of the encounter DC. DC 19 encounter, 17-18 is track, 15-16 is spoor, natural 20 is lair.

So looking over this today, I came up with a solution I like and will try. Nat 20 is a lair, encounter DC-1 is spoor, -2 is tracks, -3 and -4 are traces. Now to make encounter tables!

I removed the graph side and pelaced it with a rocketbook page (not shown). Here is the revised tracker in google drive.

Nuggets #2 is live!

PWYW on DTRPG


get it here


I'm so happy about this one.

Cockatrice Nuggets #45 show notes

Episode 45

Published on April 3, 2019

Recap of my Midgard Dungeons and Dragons campaign and reviewing the prep from my last episode.

GM binder inspiration

Morgau noble, whatever that means, lol I'm a GM who has no idea what the players have used out of my book! I've never even read Midgard Adventures!

Dungeon of the Mad Mage

Head of Vecna

Shadow Tor in Castle Sites

Perilous Wilds

Castle Oldskull Excel Sheet

Thanks for listening! As always you can find me on Patreon, Blogger, Anchor, and the various socials; Facebook, Twitter, Audio Dungeon Discord and I have a room at Tenkar's Tavern Discord. Hope to see you there!

Review on Itunes.

Follow along: 

Midgard map

Midgard Setting Books

World Anvil

House Rules

Cockatrice Nuggets #44 show notes

Episode 44

March 23, 2019


prep for my kobold press midgard dungeons and dragons game.

Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
Midguard
Castle Sites 2e
Dungeon of the Mad Mage
Control panel article (shared by Ray Otus)
Audio dungeon discord
Tome of adventure design

Thanks for listening! As always you can find me on Patreon, Blogger, Anchor, and the various socials; Facebook, Twitter, Audio Dungeon Discord and I have a room at Tenkar's Tavern Discord. Hope to see you there!


Review on Itunes.

Follow along with the game:
Midgard map
Midgard Setting Books
World Anvil
House Rules

Cockatrice Nuggets #43 show notes

Just a recap of last session, thought I'd get it out before too long.

Return of the lazy dungeon master
8 steps

Thanks for listening!

Follow along:
Midgard map
Midgard Setting Books

Leave me a voice message on anchor.fm, visit me at slackernerds.com and patreon.com/jerry247, or email me at cockatricenuggets@slackernerds.com

Cockatrice Nuggets #42

Sorry about the sound on this one, my car window broke and you can hear the garbage bag flattering in the background.
The one where I talk failed encounters and dungeons and dragon midgard recap.

Anchor.fm
where did you all come from?
encounter table fail
hex crawl encounters on slackernerds
xnathar's guide to everything
kobold press makers of midgard, Tome of Beasts and Creature Codex
Recap of last session
obsidion portal
scabard
world anvil
what I'm listening to
random screed
Hobbs n friends
spikepit
gothridge manor
follow me and die
frank t
tavern chat
radio grognard
frothcast
red dice diaries

Thanks for listening!

Cockatrice Nuggets #41 - Show Notes

Links:
Guildmasters Guide to Ravnica
The Thing
The Fallen - it was Denzel!
zak s Investigation-As-Dungeon
Gumshoe rules DrivethruRPG
Sly Flourish secrets Return of the Lazy DM
Lost Boys
5RD article
5RD excel sheet
Ghost Ward Armor Crystal
Spikepit
Ray Otis - Plundergrounds
Larry Hamilton - Follow Me, and Die 
Audio Dungeon Discord

Thanks for listening!

Five Room Dungeon Tables

I need to make up some Five Room Dungeons, so I wrote some tables for inspiration. Five room dungeons are an idea from John Four that makes a dungeon from five small challenges. The rooms can be large or small and arranged in many formations. The rooms are:

       1.       Entrance or Guardian

       2.       Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge

       3.       Trick or Setback

       4.       Climax, Big Battle, or Conflict

       5.       Reward, Revelation, or Plot Twist.

The first thing I wanted was a theme table to tie the rooms together. I decided on eight different themes or places the dungeon could be.

Next I started to work on the rooms. I made some separate table and started brainstorming ideas fitting them into each list. After a few items, I started to come up with things that could fit in multiple lists, sometimes all of them! I decided to take another approach, to break each room up into what generic things could be in them. I came up with something to negotiate with (person), something to find (place), and something to overcome (thing). I was looking for nouns! Now I made lists of people, places, and things. As I looked over these I saw that some of them fit more naturally into the room designs. People fit more naturally into rooms one and four, places in one or three. I decided to weight each room with a negative, zero, or positive; from there picking a randomizer that fit my odds (thanks anydice).

I started tweaking my lists of nouns and realized I needed to weight one of the tables to make some places (planar) more rare. Instead of testing this out with dice, I wanted to run some really quick rolls and see instant results. I wrote an excel sheet to help me quickly randomize, copy, and paste. I forgot about the weighting I had done for the places, and you’ll see that in my original results. Without further ado, here are my six Five Room Dungeons.

1) Treasure Vault

Entrance or Guardian: Upon opening this hidden away area, you notice that it is or was recently inhabited. A tattered rug covers the floor, a table and 2 chairs sit off to the side, a small collection of books on a shelf of a bookcase, a comfy chair for reading and a long hallway stretches off in the distance. The rug hides a pressure plate that starts a slow rumbling in the hallway. If the players move it they can beat the crumbling hall. If the players wait, they realize that they will be cut off from the rest of the dungeon if they don’t move. Dexterity saving throw will get them past the falling rocks with no damage, half for failure. After the hall crumbles, it will take 250 man hours to unearth the whole 250 feet.

Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge: There is a woman, Sarin, caught in a circle of magical energy. She tells the party if the salt circle is broken, she can go free. She is a high level thief looking to loot the vault. She will betray the party if necessary.

Trick or Setback: This is a large room, it has small mouse sized holes that lead into hidden areas in the walls and ceiling. There is a hag, Hilda, hiding here who entered a pact to guard the vault for 101 years. If the vault is breached she will be trapped here forever. The hag uses the holes to enter the walls and cast from cover.

Climax, Big Battle, or Conflict: The vault is locked by a large circle divided in to four quadrants. They are colored yellow, blue, brown, and white. To open the lock a spell from each element (fire, water, earth, and air) must be cast in secession. The order does not matter, as long as they are cast one after another.

Reward, Revelation, Plot Twist: Aside from gold in the vault, there is also a Ring of Three Whooshes. It can cast longstrider three times per day.

2) Giant Burial Chambers

Entrance or Guardian: An unnatural pond, on a mountain top far from much of anything. If you submerge yourself in the pond you will emerge in a dark, carved stone entry room with a similar pool.

Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge: Three stone giant ghosts guard this area. They will warn the characters (in giant) not to disturb the contents of the tombs.

Trick or Setback: A stone Giant lairs here, melded into the stone and watching over the tombs. He has been shunned by his people for something he did long ago.

Climax, Big Battle, or Conflict: A fey lurks here in the shadows, seeking revenge on the giants that lay here. The fey will encourage the characters to seek the sword.

Reward, Revelation, Plot Twist: A sword that contains their souls is here, if used and reduce a creature to 0 HP it will release a soul as a giant shadow under the welders control for 1 hour before vanishing. It has 10 'charges' and turns to a non-magical sword after they are all used, damning the giants souls to the abyss.

3) Shadow Monastery

Entrance or Guardian: A haunted monastery lies in near ruins, the veil between worlds is thin here and shadowy apparitions of the former students can be seen eternally practicing, trapped between life and death. An entrance can be found deep in the bowels of the old monastery, linking to a shadowfell version of the building.

Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge: A monk on the other side says that they are all trapped here by a bell that can be heard ringing in the distance.

Trick or Setback: If the party goes toward the sound they will have an encounter with aggressive monks.

Climax, Big Battle, or Conflict: The Bell is a construct with sonic attacks.

Reward, Revelation, Plot Twist: Before the monk leaves the shadowfell behind, he will open a portal back and give the party a ghost rune. Ghost rune can be transferred to a non-magical suit of armor or weapon. If attached to a weapon, weapon can instead do cold or necrotic damage. If a creature is immune to cold damage, it is reduced to resistant for this attack; if it is resistant it is reduced to normal damage. If the creature does not have a resistance or immunity to cold damage and cold is chosen, critical hits to three times the normal effect.

4) Tower on the Border

Entrance or Guardian: A haunted tower is guarded by the ghost of a wizard, he warns that the darkness shall destroy you.

Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge: There is a black pudding here trapped in a large glass container with a door facing out. On the other side of this large room is an area that has one inch holes in the floor that go down twenty feet to a pressure plate that opens a secret blue portal. The pressure plate must have the weight a large creature on it (the black pudding). The black pudding can then squeeze its way through a passage under the floor and back into the glass container through a hole in the bottom, resetting the puzzle.

Trick or Setback: There is a portal on each wall of this rectangular room, the one the characters step through changes to a different color (green). The other portals are (right to left) black, yellow, and red. If the players choose any but the black, they are teleported d4 hexes (24 miles each) away.

Climax, Big Battle, or Conflict: The wizard from the entrance is here and shadow touched. He is invisible and holds the key of a great cage that surrounds the party. There are signs of someone have been here recently and a tracking check will lead them to bump into the wizard. Defeating the crazy wizard or otherwise finding the key will let the PCs out of the cage. The wizard will explain how the players can get back using the closest shadow portal (d4x6 miles away).

Reward, Revelation, Plot Twist: The wizard wears a robe of illusion, it has seventeen charges that can be used to can cast an illusion spell from zero to fourth level (DM chooses one spell per level). Each spell can be cast for the spells level +1 charge; e.g. a cantrip is 1 charge, a first level spell is 2 charges. It disintegrates after the last charge is used.

5) Prison of the Ravager

Entrance or Guardian: A shadowfell prison holds a bound carrion, or ghoul demon. To enter the foul jail requires a pound of flesh placed into a bedrock mortar in a large boulder in an out of the way place in the forest.

Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge: The Ravager has been imprisoned here for countless years, he asks the party to free him and offers to make them generals in his army as well as lead them out of the prison.

Trick or Setback: This room contains five cauldrons full of burbling liquids. When the red, green, blue, yellow, and orange liquids are drank by themselves they do nothing, when mixed together they do a random result.

2d6	Effect
2	+1 strength
3	+1 intelligence
4	Paralyzed for an hour.
5	+1 wisdom
6-8	Aged by twenty five percent of current age.
9	+1 charisma
10	Polymorphed into a sheep for an hour.
11	+1 constitution
12	+1 dexterity

Climax, Big Battle, or Conflict: An undead fey guards the exit and will die before he lets the demon leave. He knows the Ravager’s true name.

Reward, Revelation, Plot Twist: There is a secret room that has a magic mouth that speaks the demons true name, Catullus.

6) Astral Erratic

Entrance or Guardian: An Astral dragon, Ansmon, makes his lair in this huge chunk of rock and stages attacks on astral raiders from here.

Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge: A very young, seventy-five, elven ranger, Laira resides here and serves as guardian to the dragon’s lair. She was captured infiltrating the dragon’s lair and has since joined the cause.

Trick or Setback: A monk, Ranek, lives here, forced into a contract when the dragon destroyed his monastery on a separate errant in the astral plane. He has been here for only a few years, arriving after the Laira.

Climax, Big Battle, or Conflict: The dragon will attack any who enter here without Laira.

Reward, Revelation, Plot Twist: The dragon keep a journal of his conquests, including mind wiping Laira after destroying her trespassing family.

Next is tweaking of the tables to a specific area and using specific monster instead of generic placeholders.

More hexcrawling

I’m working on a few new systems for my hexcrawling and thought I’d bring you all on the ride! I mention my time pool and thought I’d explain it here. Every time a player does an action that takes between three and ten minutes I drop a die in the time bucket. Once a sixth die is dropped in there or if they do something that would attract unwanted attention, I roll the dice and check for an encounter. The number of successes correlates (ideally) with the encounter difficulty. OK, time to get to work.

I’m trying something new for my random encounters, traces, spoor, and encounters. I’m also counting successes by setting a base DC for an encounter and then subtracting my roll to get a degree of severity. Each degree checks off a box in order of traces, traces, tracks, spoor, lair, and creature, each step revealing more of the possible encounter. I’ve decided to start this because of how I roll encounters (with a time pool) for dungeons. Right now I’ve set DCs for five categories. Let’s take a look.

Desolate	Unsettled	Frontier	Scattered	Dense
19	18	17	16	15

So if the frontier encounter roll is 19, three boxes are checked (17, 18, 19); so traces, traces, and spoor is found. The next encounter check will add to the same set of boxes and will clear after the encounter roll for overnight. Using six mile hexes rolling once for each hex and once for rest will get me five rolls. Of course, thinking more on that, that’s only on easily traveled land. This leads me to think there will never be an encounter on a mountains hex as it takes one day to cross a mountain hex. Also wild encounters may be more prevalent in unsettled territory than in densely populated areas, but encounters in general may not be. So let’s change some things.  I think I will roll encounters based on time and use these descriptors and DCs instead.

Creature population	Dense	Scattered	Desolate
Encounter DC	19	17	15

That makes it so I can roll every four hours bringing the daily total to six encounter rolls two of which being at night. So this seems to work out for monsters, but in civilized areas there will be more encounters with humanoids. We can count the lair as a camp, outpost, or hideout. I’m thinking we can skip some of the smaller steps in the ladder if we want. Say finding some traces and spore next encounter rolling past lair and heading straight to creature. Switching lair and creature in the order is an option too, resetting the boxes after a creature is rolled.

I’ve got a lot of stuff to keep track of now and the way I’m keeping track of time on my encounter worksheet is not working out anymore. Here’s a list of things I need to keep track of:

·         Time

·         Days

·         Encounter level

·         Encounter DC

·         Rounds

·         Torches/Light (1hour/4hours)

Rounds

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Minutes (mark torch or lantern in top)

5	10	15	20	25	30	35	40	45	50	55	60

Hours (mark torch or lantern in top)

12	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11

Days

1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28

Easy! I’m not sure where to put torches at, I’ll leave them in both hours and minutes for now and see where I use it the most. Hours seem like the most for me because I use a time pool to track hours, but that’s only indoors.  Now I’ll just format, print, and laminate it and have exactly what I need. I printed it out with graph paper on the back and presto, a new tracker for my table, hopefully it lasts through testing.