Some Current Inspirations (not sponsored by POCARI SWEAT)

Just a little mini-post while I work on some slightly bigger stuff. Here are a few (more or less) D&D related things I've been stealing from recently for my D&D game:

Ben Milton reviews OSR stuff here. He's good at it, and has excellent taste as far as I'm concerned. Plus he made an RPG called Maze Rats that looks really simple and fun to run. I definitely want to try it some time.

Matt Finch over at Uncle Matt's D&D Studio is great. He has an Actual Play series called Swords of Jordoba that uses cool terrain and a little camera for the miniatures' point of view!

Critical Role is the biggest D&D Actual Play out there, they just recently started a new campaign so it's a great time to jump on. You can watch the first episode on YouTube here, on Twitch, or listen to it on any podcast service.

Delicious in Dungeon is maybe the best dungeon-crawl-esque piece of fiction I've ever read, with the added bonus of being about food. I learned to cook in a Japanese kitchen so I have fun recognising a lot of things, but even if you don't know Japanese food at all, this is a wonderful series. It's also one of the most (if not the most) popular current manga series by a female author/artist. Amazon link to the first volume here.

My girlfriend and I play YuGiOh sometimes, it's fun and the monsters on the cards are Hugely Varied and Supremely Dumb. The creator was a huge D&D fan and even though it's evolved from there, you could put any of those creatures right back into your game. Scrap Princess did a cool post here about the design of some of the weirder monsters, which I appreciate as visual art is not my background.

So Pocari Sweat is a drink in Japan (yes it's called Sweat, you drink it), it's kind of like Lucozade or something. It's not great, I mainly just like the name. Anyway, twitter user @pabl0km shared a couple of old ads for it from back in the day, and... just look. The whole thing is layer upon layer of utterly ridiculous, and I love it. That's a whole campaign setting right there!

On a similar(???) note here's a video from an old TSR product that was never released. Send it to your players if you're starting a Spelljammer-type space fantasy game.

Etrian Odyssey is a supremely old-school dungeon crawling game series on the DS and 3DS, where you make a party of fantasy adventurers and take on a megadungeon based in, on or around the World Tree from Norse myth. The latest one, Etrian Odyssey V, is probably the best so far, I'm having a blast with it.

I want to get into pulp fantasy since that's the genre we're all playing in here, so I just got the complete Conan series to read through. One story in so far, no real opinions yet. It's free on Kindle, check it out.

And of course all the rest of the blogs in the list on the side. They're like this one, but written by smarter and more interesting people.