Running Off The Rails – Details, episodes & analysis

In this episode Ariel and Ray take one last look at the Armorsmith's Handbook, a massive endeavor from the Grim Press that has to introduce twenty unique places to your campaign setting. Ray and Ariel discuss how to read and prepare box text so that your players immediately know where they are and why they should care about it. Then they talk about how to expand on a setting idea once you've settled on where you want to go, so that the setting feels alive and your players feel engaged after the first impression.

Sign up for your copy of the ⁠Armorsmith's Handbook⁠ at ⁠bit.ly/armorsmith⁠ today!

Included in this this 175+ page sourcebook, we've created 20 drop-in merchants for your game of 5th Edition.

Accompanying each armorsmith is

• A fully-illustrated portrait art piece
• A detailed background and roleplaying guideline
• A top-down map of their shop
• and a full table of unique wares tailored to their shop specifically. On these tables you will find food, wonderous magic items, spell scrolls, potions, and of course, magical armor. In fact, Aaron Gentry and Ray created 10 new pieces of magical armor for each armorsmith and Sandy Lawson created art for every single piece. That's 200 brand new fully arted pieces of magical armor for your game of 5th edition.

Sign up for your copy of the Armorsmith's Handbook at bit.ly/armorsmith today!

Included in this this 175+ page sourcebook, we've created 20 drop-in merchants for your game of 5th Edition.

Accompanying each armorsmith is

• A fully-illustrated portrait art piece
• A detailed background and roleplaying guideline
• A top-down map of their shop
• and a full table of unique wares tailored to their shop specifically. On these tables you will find food, wonderous magic items, spell scrolls, potions, and of course, magical armor. In fact, Aaron Gentry and Ray created 10 new pieces of magical armor for each armorsmith and Sandy Lawson created art for every single piece. That's 200 brand new fully arted pieces of magical armor for your game of 5th edition.

Ray and Ariel provide mechanics that address specific criticisms they made of 5e in the previous episode. Here are some short rules that will...

• Prompt players to choose between a more diverse set of weapons
• Inspire new rivalries between different types of spellcasters
• Help you to present more varied loot and rewards to your players.

Three design tools modern games use to make interesting encounters: power budgets, counters, and hands/throws. Dungeons and Dragons falls short in implementing these design principles sometimes for the sake of simplicity. Let's fix it.

Show Notes: https://www.runningofftherails.com/en-us/articles/decisions-episode-notes

Website: https://runningofftherails.com

Emery’s Log of Legendary Eminences: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/runningofftherails/emerys-log-of-legendary-eminences⁠

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/runningofftherails

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RunningOffRails

Ray and Ariel discuss running travel in D&D. They discuss the opportunity cost of running travel and what can be added to it to make it time well spent. They offer specific tools and examples of how you can make travel unique and something that players look forward to. We hope you enjoy.

If you liked the show today, please follow us on Instagram. It is the only means we have to spread the word and put our show in front of new listeners.

Ray and Ariel discuss how to run 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. Should you use Sandboxing or Railroading as your foundational style? We offer some actionable tips and tricks to help Game Masters experiment with both styles. Though we use D&D as the vehicle to discuss these concepts they are applicable to other popular roleplaying games like Blades in The Dark, Star Wars Fantasy Flight, Fate Core, Call of Cthulhu, Monster of the Week, Cyberpunk Red, and Masks.

<p>If you liked the show today, please <a href="https://www.instagram.com/runningofftherails/">follow us on Instagram</a>. It is the only means we have to spread the word and put our show in front of new listeners.</p>

Ray and Ariel discuss the three design tools modern games use to make interesting encounters: power budgets, counters, and hands/throws. Dungeons and Dragons falls short in implementing these design principles sometimes for the sake of simplicity, but often because it is catering to a different experience than a video game with instantaneous game-matching and player feedback. Ray and Ariel dig deeper though, and look for the specific places where Dungeon and Dragons could implement these concepts and improve on players' decision-making experience

Amazing video by Game Designer's Toolkit that discusses Trade-offs, Counters, Hands and Throws and how video games get balanced:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXQzdXPTb2A&ab_channel=GameMaker%27sToolkit

Website: https://runningofftherails.com

Emery’s Log of Legendary Eminences: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/runningofftherails/emerys-log-of-legendary-eminences⁠

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/runningofftherails

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RunningOffRails

Ray and Ariel discuss how to spice up the Find Familiar spell in dungeons and dragons. Familiars can often feel like a spell effect in our campaigns rather than fully fledged characters. Ray and Ariel were both inspired the hilarious fox familiar in Worlds Beyond Number to think up different ways DMs can create memorable familiars for their players.

Ray and Ariel present mechanics for familiar progression, discuss how to treat familiars as NPCs in your world, and come up with a few modifications to the find familiar ritual.

Website: https://runningofftherails.com

Emery’s Log of Legendary Eminences: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/runningofftherails/emerys-log-of-legendary-eminences⁠

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/runningofftherails

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RunningOffRails

Ray and Ariel discuss achieving prestige fantasies in D&D 5e. Why did the 5e Prestige Classes unearthed arcana miss the mark?

Then Ray and Ariel present mechanics for how they think that discovered and unexpected character paths can be successful in D&D 5e.

Website: https://runningofftherails.com

Emery’s Log of Legendary Eminences: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/runningofftherails/emerys-log-of-legendary-eminences⁠

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/runningofftherails

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RunningOffRails

Link to Worlds Beyond Number: https://worldsbeyondnumber.com/

Ray and Ariel discuss their newest source of D&D inspiration, Worlds Beyond Number. Their first project, The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One is a captivating coming of age story. The story told by Brennan Lee Mulligan, Erika Ishii, Aabria Iyengar, and Lou Wilson invokes the wonder of Hayao Miyazaki movies and inspires us to bring a more curated experience to our games of D&D.

Website: https://runningofftherails.com

Emery's Log of Legendary Eminences: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/runningofftherails/emerys-log-of-legendary-eminences

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/runningofftherails/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RunningOffRails

Ray and Ariel continue their discussion on how to create puzzles ingrained in the setting of your world that your players will enjoy. They have each prepared puzzles to add some concrete examples for how to run puzzles effectively and published them in the RotR blog here https://www.runningofftherails.com/en-us/articles.  In this episode, Ray and Ariel work through six points that helped guide their puzzle design. They use these checkpoints to make sure that the puzzles are a meaningful part of their campaign setting, and their players have total agency in how they tackle them.

If you enjoyed the show today, please follow us on Instagram and Twitter for updates about giveaways, blog posts, new Youtube content, and new DM's guild content.

Website: https://runningofftherails.com

Emery's Log of Legendary Eminences: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/runningofftherails/emerys-log-of-legendary-eminences

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/runningofftherails/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RunningOffRails