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General

Alignment Is Dead: The Birth and Death of an RPG Staple

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Oh spoot! We all know that religion, money, and alignment are the three topics to avoid in polite conversation, and I’ve just mentioned the third. Well, since I’m being rude, I might as well go all out and say that alignment is dead. Isn’t it?

A Short Bro History of Alignment

Michael Moorcock is probably the inventor of alignment. Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné was an agent of Chaos, and he turned to Chaotic powers to fight against Chaos so that Law would return some modicum of balance to the force world. Moorcock also invented the eight-pointed Chaos symbol, which Games Workshop stole appropriated for Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40,000. And, since sword and sorcery was an important inspiration for Dungeons & Dragons, it’s not hard to blame Gary Gygax for stealing appropriating Moorcock’s idea about Chaos and Law for D&D.

Fibonacci, CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons

But I don’t think Moorcock intended Law or Chaos to define a person in the same way alignment defines a character. Elric fought on the side of Good and of Law, but he was a murdering psychopath who killed friends and lovers while in the throes of his bloodlust. Yes, an evil sword was involved, but if Elric was Lawful Good, he’d never have picked up the sword in the first place.

What About Religion?

I don’t believe people are intrinsically good. Or intrinsically evil, in the way we commonly understand evil to include a willingness to murder, rape, and steal. But we are susceptible to temptation. We lie, and then lie to ourselves that the lie was only a white lie. If lying is evil, then, by lying, we become evil.

No. Some deep theological understandings need unpacking to fully understand this concept, but I believe we’re better off describing ourselves as broken sinners. Only God is good. Humans rock the needle on the Good-Bad sensor so wildly back and forth that using Good or Bad as an indicator of character is useless. My proof is every role model out there who has ever fallen from public opinion.

A Better Solution or No Solution At All

Alignment is useful in the same way icons on a phone are useful. They’re a simplification. For a game, that’s all you need. Alignment gave us nine ways to define a character, and it worked. Mostly. There were many arguments.

One of the many things I love about Pathfinder Second Edition is that alignment vanished, and we got evil and good baked into traits like holy and unholy. This isn’t alignment. This isn’t a feeling. We can finally have morally gray characters.

I think alignment still has its uses. When I build characters or monsters, I often give them an alignment even if it isn’t going to be published or on the character sheet. It’s a cue for me. But those cues are becoming less meaningful, especially as I work to create better-rounded characters.

General

Make Scary RPG Monsters for D&D or Pathfinder to Challenge Your Players

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How do you build scary RPG monsters for D&D or Pathfinder? How do you give your players the heebies and the jeebies with fresh monster designs?

Fear comes from building tension. It’s the anticipation of something terrible, like a jump scare, that evokes feelings of dread.

Cruel Trinkets

I love birds, and some of my best memories are of bird watching with my family. But put me near a pigeon and I’ll sweat boulders. And it’s not that I’m scared of birds. What scares me is the expectation that they’ll start flapping and swoosh past my head. My ornithophobia only turns on when I expect a bird to launch itself toward me.

We can use the same principle to scare the pants off our players. Metaphorically speaking. Strip D&D isn’t sanctioned by WotC. Yet.

Making Monsters for Science and Fear

To illustrate, let’s build a scary unicorn for Pathfinder Second Edition. The fear of balloons popping (globophobia) will give us a surprising twist, so let’s start there.

I like the idea of a cute unicorn floating aimlessly around, and cute can be scary. When it takes damage, our uni sucks air in with an angry pout. And, as it inflates larger and takes more damage, this air mine becomes more volatile. Fear the boom!

Make scary RPG monsters of your own, like the unipoof.

Filling a forest glade with floating unipoofs and then having adjacent unipoofs make horn attacks against each other to set off a chain reaction is a low blow, but I’ll endorse you. Great idea!

For exploration encounters, tweak the Ready to Pop ability so that checks happen every half hour instead of every round. Escorting a unipoof through a trap-filled dungeon now becomes a tense adventure with higher stakes.

It’s Your Turn to Make Scary RPG Monsters

What phobia can you turn into scary RPG monsters? What mechanics will you design to build tension over time?

You can use our D&D monster builder or the great Pathfinder Second Edition monster builder at monster.pf2.tools to make your creatures. Both apps will help you keep the maths solid. Post your monster link and a description in the comments!

General

Blood & Grit: Neon Nightmares Might Be Our Best Game Ever

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Gibson’s Neuromancer meets Howard’s Conan. That’s what Blood & Grit: Neon Nightmares is. And it’s friggin’ cool!

And yes, I’m trying to get you to buy into, and buy (different things) the game. But I’m praising the game because of how much fun I had making it. I’m sure you’ll enjoy playing it, because the rules have a solid foundation, and the setting is evocative (we worked hard on that). However, I had fun because making the game felt like I’d discovered an exciting new toy, like when I first held a He-Man, ThunderCats, or TMNT action figure.

The Secret Sauce of Evocative Adventure Design

Someone at Paizo—I think it was James Sutter, but I apologize if I’m wrong—talked about mashing two things together to make something cool. Like ninjas and turtles. Or felines and dangerous weather phenomena. Or, in the case of Blood & Grit: Neon Nightmares, a digital dream otherworld and sword-brandishing bravos.

If you need to classify Blood & Grit: Neon Nightmares, then call it a grim-neon game. Or cyberdark. Swords & cyberpunk? Grim-punk? Heck, I have no idea. But the synergy fired my synapses and helped me spew out ideas.

Let that be a lesson to you when you’re suffering from GM’s block. Take two things you love, slam them together hard enough to reconfigure their atoms as one consolidated whole, and see if that doesn’t lead you down a rad rabbit hole of ideas.

Blood & Grit: Neon Nightmares is Made in DNA

I loved the idea of swords & code sorcery, which neatly turned Blood & Grit into a unique game. But how do I put that idea onto the page? How do I get you to follow me into this nightmare neonscape?

Made in DNA took the initial concept of code magic and heroic fantasy and built a mad, verdant reality from those bones. His fiction runs through the rulebook like a wired vein, pumping mental imagery onto the page to inspire GMs and players. Check out his work.

Jack into Blood & Grit: Neon Nightmares

Blood & Grit: Neon Nightmares is a game jam game, so it could use a fair bit of polish. That said, the game feels right and has the makings of a great game. If you love sword & sorcery and cyberpunk as much as we do, grab the book and crack some skulls. It’ll be bloody fun!

Get Blood & Grit: Neon Nightmares on DriveThruRPG!

Magic Life Lessons, Tips and Tricks

Boros Aggro Goes Hot: The Best Red/White Aggro Deck in MtG, April 2025

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If you want to rush up the rankings in MTG Arena, you need a deck that can win quickly and reliably in Standard format. The current meta has a red and white mice and monks Boros aggro deck going big for an impressive win rate.

Winning games of Magic: the Gathering in a few rounds is the best way to play more games. And playing more games is the best way to rank up. End of story. But okay, Magic is a game, and it’s supposed to be fun. So what could be more fun than rushing at your opponent with a huge mouse and his buff monk buddy to deliver 11 damage to the face?

Boros aggro with Heartfire Hero
Copyright and TM, Wizards of the Coast 2024

Boros Aggro Mice & Monks Deck List

Cards are listed with the number of copies first, then the name, the set list in brackets (with the full name below the list), and the card’s number in the set last:

BLB: Bloomburrow
MH3: Modern Horizons 3
KTK: Khans of Tarkir
DSK: Duskmourn: House of Horror
RTR: Return to Ravnica
WOE: Wilds of Eldraine
OTJ: Outlaws of Thunder Junction

Use your spells to buff your creatures and rush in swinging. That’s the Boros aggro way! Every card is cheap, so a great strategy is to muligan until you have at least a plain, a mountain, and a creature in your starting hand. Sheltered by Ghosts will grab pesky blockers and pump Optimistic Scavenger up so you can get big hits in before your opponent musters effective blockers.



General

Can We Make RPG Death Exciting Again?

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RPG players spend way too much time trying to stay alive. Okay, I’ll give it to you that staying alive is an acceptable way to play. But what if we could make RPG death exciting? What if we could add a spin on dying that could make your RPG sessions more challenging and rewarding for your players?

I recently released Just Get Better, which — let’s be honest —  was an attempt to shoehorn my sword & sorcery ideas into the GMTK Game Jam’s theme. Surprisingly, it worked. But I didn’t realize how well it had worked until I played Blood West.

The Genius of Blood West

Blood West is pitched as a Wild West survival horror. What makes the game great is that it turns grinding into a fun and repeatable challenge.

You’ve got to work hard for your first kill. You might feel more confident about your second, but eventually, you’ll slip up. You’ll get too close, miss your shot, or fall off a cliff.

When you — inevitably — die, you gain a curse. Your first curse isn’t a big deal, maybe a 2 percent reduction in health, but it feels like you’re up against the wall. You can tell that dying will eat into your meager supplies and make an already challenging game harder. So you dig in, ready to be more cautious and cunning.

Now you kill tactically, thinning out an area from the periphery before plunging in where the monsters are thickest. You save whatever you can scrounge. And headshots become your signature move.

But then you die again.

Now you realize that some of the monsters respawned. You have to clear areas a second time. And you remember how hard you worked to clear them the first go around. However, you notice you’re getting better at anticipating how monsters react. You’ve even got some swanky new weapons to kill ‘em with.

The cycle of death repeats. Old areas become speed runs. You can headshot a zombie at a run and have a few tricks for those wendigo. And man, it’s a helluvalot of fun.

Hard As Hell with a Soft Reset

The genius of Blood West is that it tempers a hard game with soft resets. You have options to soften the impact of curses when you die, and not all your enemies return. You also benefit from experience and skills, both programmed and personal. Die often and quickly though and you’ll still get a hard enough reset.

Likewise, Just Get Better works when you combine a player character’s immortality with deadly difficult, repeatable, and short encounters. The fun happens when the players try something different, and it works. That sense of achievement is priceless.

Effectively, you give the players a deadly puzzle and all the retries they need to solve it.

Cruel Trinkets

One last note on encounter design: spreading out an encounter gives players some breathing room. If one skeleton can see another but would need a turn to enter combat, then the party has a good reason for executing the first with a quick kill. If they botch the attack they have a round to figure out a contingency.



General

How do DriveThruRPG Medals Work, and Why do They Matter?

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DriveThruRPG medals are an important detail that’ll help you make good buying choices on the Internet’s largest RPG store, DriveThruRPG. Let’s explore how titles earn them and why you should pay attention to these shiny bits of digital metal.

How RPG Titles Earn DriveThruRPG Medals

According to the DriveThru Partners Help Center, medals are awarded for sales of products priced at $0.20 or more. A title needs to pass the following number of units sold to earn the related medal:

  1. Copper: 51
  2. Silver: 101
  3. Electrum: 251
  4. Gold: 501
  5. Platinum: 1,001
  6. Mithral: 2,501
  7. Adamantine: 5,001

Running the Numbers

Let’s put those numbers into perspective.

On DriveThruRPG, Platinum (a total of 2,538 titles at the time of writing), Mithral (555 titles), and Adamantine (264 titles) account for 2.22% of all titles with medals. That’s 3,357 titles — the cream of the crop.

We know that major publishing houses, like Penguin Random House, rely on repeat best sellers — such as The Bible, Lord of the Rings, celebrity bios, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, etc. — for their income. The rest of their offering consists of titles that sell less than 1,000 copies, each. That, however, is mainstream publishing. RPG titles, which fall into the tabletop hobby niche, are a minuscule slice of a tiny pie in comparison.

However, this insight indicates that anything under Platinum Seller is still a respectable achievement.

Our Example: Rising Phoenix Games

Selling 51 units is sometimes a small feat for small publishers like us.

While we have a Mithral title (Player’s Companion for D&D), a Gold title (Aurora’s Whole Realms Winter Catalogue), and a handful of Electrum titles (also all for D&D 5e) most of our titles are Silver or Copper sellers. We’ll typically hit Copper Seller in weeks for a Pathfinder product.

Bio Heist Cover Sales Page
Bioheist is our latest Copper Seller. We hit 51 sales thanks to the interest from DriveThruRPG’s Pocket Quest game jam.

Despite releasing multiple titles a year and marketing to an established customer base, many of our titles, like our Apothecary alternate class for D&D, may take years to break the 50-sales mark. Hobby publishers with no social media footprint are in for a harder time. Especially publishing their own game or creating content for less popular systems than Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition or the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

We love DriveThruRPG medals. They motivate us. But what do the medals mean for customers?

Why DriveThruRPG Medals Matter

Medals don’t prove quality. Since a publisher earns them from sales, good marketing can conceal problems like poor mechanics, bad art, or fumbled layouts. If enough customers want and pay for the product it’ll earn medals.

But when a product has medals and reviews you’ll start to see a clearer picture of the game’s worth. In my experience, customers won’t leave a review unless they’re angry about something or they’re a reviewer. Does a lack of ratings and reviews indicate a good game? Does it mean customers were generally satisfied if a product has earned medals but customers left no feedback? Maybe.

My advice is to read whatever reviews you can find, either on DriveThruRPG or on other great stores like the Open Gaming Store, Paizo, or Itch. Ultimately, if the game looks good to you, drop some money on it. That way you’re supporting creators and showing them that their creation resonated with you.

Every cent is appreciated.

General

Mystery Dice: Can we Unravel D&D’s Greatest Mystery?

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Dice. Can you ever own enough? Will they roll high when it matters? These questions might be the greatest mysteries of our wonderful roleplaying hobby. Or it’s “What’s in a pack of Mystery Dice?” I’m here to rip open that mystery like a frenzied goblin oracle tearing apart a loot sack!

Rip open a bag of Mystery Dice
Rip open a bag of Mystery Dice!

Mystery Dice? What’s in the Bag?

Mystery Dice, from UK-based Mystery Dice Goblins, are blind bags of 7 RPG dice. They’re perfect for games of Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder. There’s the caltrop-of-doom D4, the ubiquitous D6, the D8, the pair of D10s (units die and tens die), the D12, and the mighty D20. Each bag’s contents are colour-matched, so you get a complete, colour-coordinated set. However, the transparent purple set I opened has 5 dark purple and 2 light purple dice. I call it my “Berry Blast” set. Although the variation is noticeable, they still look fantastic together. I love them!

Berry Blast RPG Mystery Dice

The dice are a good, standard size. The set I’m playing with are slightly rough distressed blue dice. The D4 and D6 are slightly bigger than the same dice from the Pathfinder Beginner Box set, which is only noticeable when you carefully compare them.

Distressed Blue Mystery Dice

All the numbers on the dice are clear, and that readability is important to me. We need to see those numbers! In our third set, the gold paint on green and white marbling produces a low contrast, but I’ll take elegance over readability in this case. These are some of our most beautiful dice — the other being a green and black marbled set, which belongs to my wife. She has excellent taste.

Mystery Dice Marbled Green and White

Blind Bags are a Party, in a Bag

Skeptical of blind bags? Me too, but I remember being a kid and the fun we had opening those Monster in My Pocket packets. The fun’s still there today. Opening each pack was an exciting rush of endorphins, and I was happy with every dice I got. Several older sets are getting the boot from my collection to make way for the new arrivals.

Grab some bags with your gaming group, then figure out who gets the first pick. You’ll have a blast and get a set you love as part of the deal. Christmas is far off, but Mystery Dice are the perfect stocking filler. They’re also a great gift for gamer friends or prizes for your gaming club.

Where to Buy Mystery Dice

You can buy Mystery Dice from the Mystery Dice Goblins website.

Keep Rolling!

Banner: Welcome to the Wasteland! Fallout the Roleplaying Game from Modiphius Entertainment available @ DriveThruRPG.com

General, Magic Life Lessons

Party Up: Friends vs Monsters, and Life

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Do you ever feel alone? Do you feel like the world’s too much, and it’s banging on the door, trying to get you? I sometimes feel that way.

When that happens, it’s a struggle to stop my gloom-and-doom thought train and change my perspective. Recently, it was my RPG publisher friends who helped me see things differently. So, I want to talk about those friends and I want to give you a light to hold onto when things get rough.

When the Going Gets Tough, Collaborate

I reached out to a few indie RPG developers and asked if they’d join me on a bundle. The Hidden Indie RPG Treasures Bundle is available on DriveThruRPG, right now, until the end of February. I’m mentioning it now and again at the end of this post only, so the marketing is clear for you to see. Anyway, I had a great response from those friends and we made a neat little collection of indie RPG games.

I’m mentioning the collaboration because it provided a healthy change of perspective.

Toughen Up, RPG Creator

The perspective I’ve had for a long time is a warped idea of what success in the industry means. You can’t get a true sense of where you stand in the industry without friends to help you gauge it.

It’s important to understand the context here. Many of us do what we do with limited resources. We use our free time, our own money, and our sweat equity to make games. We’re passionate about the hobby, and that drives us. But it’s hard competing against bigger companies like Wizards of the Coast for those RPG dollars. If you don’t have a hit RPG title or a large social media presence, then it’s hard to get eyes on your work. Even professional, high-quality work can be ignored. Burnout is a real threat because of that. We work hard but don’t always see recognition for that effort. It can become a depressing, black hole.

Anybody, no matter what they do, might be a step away from that deep, dark abyss. Watch the news, suffer a string of bad luck, get hit with unexpected financial pressure, and the cracks start to show. Part of the issue is a false sense of the truth. Essentially, thinking we’re not good enough is a result of a foggy perception of reality.

Reaching out is incredibly hard for me to do. I’m a busy introvert. I spend a lot of time chatting with friends online, but these interactions are often superficial. The medium is restrictive. Those conversations seldom touch base with reality. That changes when friends are struggling with the same thing, like how to market an indie RPG bundle. Working together, we challenged our perceptions. We could better perceive the truth, but only together.

Perspective

I realized that Rising Phoenix wasn’t as insignificant as I thought we were. We could help guys with a handful of titles because we have a bucket-load of titles. We also saw how each effort brought in a few extra sales. Without data (or friends with experience) it’s hard to anticipate what sort of sales we might get, which leads to frustration if those sales seem lower than we hoped for.

There’s a Biblical aspect to this worth considering. In Galatians 6 verse 2 (that’s in the New International Version for this and the rest), Paul says: “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” If you draw this back to Jesus’s words of “love one another” (John 13:34) and then further back to the 10 Commandments’ “Love your neighbour” (Leviticus 19:18) then it’s clear: we should help people.

I have no scientific research confirming what we gain from helping others, but my experience has been that it’s good to step into a leaking boat with someone. Struggling together sharpens a person and helps us see the same problem from different sides.

I’m just a dude trying to make great games and figure out this crazy thing called life, and those are my two cents. I hope it’s a useful idea for you to think about.

The Hidden Indie RPG Treasures Bundle

Now, let’s talk about that bundle one last time. Our goal is to make 50 sales. That boosts overall sales since customers are more likely to buy a best-selling title, and 50 sales gives you a Copper Best-Seller badge. With roughly nine days left, we currently need another 31 sales to hit that goal. Please consider telling a friend about the bundle. Ask them to tell their friends about it too. That’ll help us in the greatest way possible.

Here’s a copy of Road to Rhune, at rogue prices (free), to help you get the bundle even cheaper.

Get the Hidden Indie RPG Treasures Bundle on DriveThruRPG today. Sale ends end of Feb.

Banner: Welcome to the Wasteland! Fallout the Roleplaying Game from Modiphius Entertainment available @ DriveThruRPG.com

General

Ectoplasmic Elemental: an Avatar of Undeath

Tombstones rip out of the ground, then twist through the air, trailing green flame. Out of the ethereal vortex rises an ectoplasmic elemental that screams through the dislocated skull of a long-dead giant.

Sea Monster Title Image

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Cleanup on aisle nine! We’re back to ectoplasm again, and there’s a lot of it.

Ghostbusters News on Twitter: "Alright, who stained the ...
(Image source)

Eeek, an Ectoplasm Elemental!

Tombstones rip out of the ground, then twist through the air, trailing green flame. Out of the ethereal vortex rises an ectoplasmic hulk that screams through the dislocated skull of a long dead giant.

Ectoplasmic elementals are the focus of powerful necromantic energies that draw in souls, creating a towering avatar of soul-matter, or ectoplasm. Such a creature is the essence of unlife, raw necrotic energy so powerful that it leeches the souls of the living nearby.

Battlefields and mass graves might provide the raw material for an ectoplasmic elemental to materialize, but it requires a dark ritual or grim series of events to initiate the process. This event cuts off the souls’ path to the afterlife, locking the souls on the Material Plane. Forced to manifest in some form, these souls might take on any of a myriad of ghostly forms. However, if the concentration of ectoplasm is strong enough, then an ectoplasmic elemental is likely to form.

Ectoplasmic Elemental stat block

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Ectoplasmic elementals are brutes, built for close combat. If you’re looking for something to support them, look for good ranged options, or keep the ranged characters in the party busy with some ectoplasmic swarms. Tight dungeons can also cut down on line of sight, and let your avatar of undeath deal with a few characters at a time.

If you enjoyed this monster, consider buying one of our bestselling books. We appreciate the support!


General

Festrog — A CR 4 Undead for D&D 5e

Bounding on long, scabrous gray limbs, this creature looks like a twisted, reanimated corpse with glowing white eyes. The festrog is a CR 4 Undead that hunts in packs and loves to terrorize its prey.

Sea Monster Title Image

The Undersea Sourcebook for Dungeons & Dragons 5e is a collection of player and GM options for running ocean-themed adventures. Subscribe for free weekly sea monsters and monthly encounters.

Over these three weeks, we’ve got three undead creatures, two of which are themed around ectoplasm. The festrog, though, is type of ghoul, making it a perfect addition to encounters with ghasts, ghouls, or other festrogs.

Festrogs: Fast, Festering Hunters

Hundreds of tiny green flames surge forward, each clawing the air with flickering fingers.

Bounding on long, scabrous gray limbs, this creature looks like a twisted, reanimated corpse with glowing white eyes.

Festrogs are bestial ghouls, created when a corpse is desecrated or embued with terrifying amounts of negative energy. Although their basic anatomy is humanoid, festrogs run on all fours, using their elongated limbs to make loping strides. Festrogs are also known as rotdogs and zombie dogs, though they aren’t zombies at all.

Terrible circumstances spawn every festrog, and the hurt and horror that birthed them fuels their unlife. This is best seen in how Festrogs, which are skilled pack hunters, toy with their prey. Often they will separate one creature from its group, injure it, then harry it for days until it finally dies of exhaustion. The pack then mutilates the corpse too, a torment that is often enough to raise the unfortunate creature as a festrog itself.

Festrogs are not natural swimmers, but their doggedness means they’ll pursue prey even through the darkest depths. Sometimes merfolk corpses become festrogs, and these are powerful swimmers with tails lines with protruding bone.

 

Festrog a CR 4 Undead for D&D 5e

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Festrogs are all about mobility and speed. Think undead velociraptors.

If you enjoyed this monster, consider buying one of our bestselling books. We appreciate the support!