Running Adventures for Differently Powered Characters

So you sit down to start running your massive Holy War campaign.  Three of the players are using characters that were in a previous campaign and their pretty super powered by now.  One joined later and is a bit behind, but not so far that he outright stinks.  But then your buddies brought over their new girlfriends and not only are they new players, but they have new characters.  Oh my freaking god!!!  This will never work!!

But it will.  Notice the lack of “!” there.  That’s calm.  You as a GM need calm.  Not every second, because too much calm is boring, but quite often you need calm.  Take some of that calm when this situation hits your gaming table, because this is how you’re going to handle it:

First, we assume you are playing a role-playing game and not a first person shooter.  If you are playing a first person shooter, this won’t work.  If you’re playing one, go find a different blog.  I may play them, but I don’t write about them.

OK, so this is a role-playing game, let’s focus on that.  It is always best if you have some little background story that justifies putting less powerful characters with more powerful characters.  Maybe they know something the more powerful characters don’t, like the location / setting - like they grew up here or something.  Perhaps they have a specialized skill that the more powerful characters do not, such as tracking, healing, or interrogating.

Why would skills or knowledge like this be good?  Because it gives them a reason to be in the party that does not revolve around killing folks.  Most aspects of game balance involve killing or being killed.  If the lower powered characters don’t need to be the big bruisers in combat, then they can still be of assistance without having to change the types of adversaries that the party as a whole is facing.

But, OK, there still needs to be some fighting, right?  Our war scenario actually works pretty well here, because in all likelihood, the party will be facing a large number of lower powered enemies.  Soldiers may be able to kill you, but they aren’t dragons and giants who will smash you in a single attack.  This allows the under-powered characters to fight enemies one at a time, while the more powerful might be plowing through three.

But let’s think about stories we watch on screens.  How many times has the hero told the damsel in distress to wait for him somewhere only to have her follow when she’s not supposed to, but she winds up smashing a flower pot over the villain’s head, saving the hero.  That stuff happens all the time!  Whether it is actually in the battle or during the battle (doing other important things), less powerful characters can be of help to the heroic folks.  Sometimes just serving as a distraction at the right moment gives the more powerful guy the chance he needs to win the fight.  But the low powered folks do need to be thinking outside the box.

But let’s think about like it were a video game, like an MMO.  What happens when a high level character wants to run a low leveled character through a mission or two?  Well, normally, the high level character needs to go down to the lower “zone” to help out.  That’s a good point of reference here.  Even if a higher level character needs to dominate the enemies, this can still be a fun adventuring style.  It is especially useful if while the big guys are easily handling lesser opponents, they can then concentrate more on helping newer players learn the rules.  Important note:  Don’t teach them by showing them what your super powered guy can do!  Show them by teaching them what their character can do!

Most role-playing games have some manner of geometric progression built into them.  This means that by the time the high level characters get their next “level” or two, the lower powered ones might be nipping at their heels.  So off-powered parties normally won’t stay that way for long.  A little bit of planning from you as the GM and a little bit of patience and the party should be in the same ballpark, plus have some pretty cool stories to tell.

This post was written as part of the soon to be released Paladin vs. Paladin aka All About Holy Wars, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one details everything having to do with paladins aka holy knights as well as the holy wars they fight in, even if those wars are against other paladins (which is when they are the most fun!).

To get the full Game Masters’ edition when it is published, you will need to be a part of our Patreon project.  There will be no free version of this edition.  Seeing as this is a double sized edition (at least over 80 pages) and the culmination of most of the last year (plus) of Small Bites editions, anyone who has been getting involved in our Small Bites project is going to want to have this edition.  Interested?  Click the link here.

Propaganda in FRPGs

Believe it or not, propaganda has a long history, far longer than you might expect.  Early examples date back as far as 500BC, so clearly it is something we should be including in our fantasy worlds.  But do we?

It can be difficult as a GM to handle propaganda, because it is a series of lies.  It’s tough enough to remember everything that is going on in your world and exponentially harder to remember the fake news that is being spread in your world.  But as we all know today, fake news exists and it has an impact on people.  After all, how many fact checkers are there in a fantasy world?  even fewer that people can rely on for neutrality.

Let’s first start with how it works.  How do the people of your fantasy world get their “news”?  Well, they share it like gossip.  Someone hears something and shares it.  We all know how the telegraph game goes where by the time you get to the end the message is completely garbled.  That has an impact, but it is not truly propaganda.

Another news source is the traveling story teller.  Whether musical, poetic or not, these folks are carrying the tales of the various communities from one to the other.  They are probably carrying the news from the capital as well.  At least here, you have one source of news, not the mixed up nonsense that comes through the gossip route, but that one source is going to add some bias.

Some worlds have broadsheets or some other form of “newspaper”.  But these aren’t newspapers the way we think of them.  Often times, they are more like comic books where the image on the front has to be so outlandish that the passerby will buy the thing just to figure out what that picture is all about.  The story tellers fall into this too.  They want to tell interesting stories, so they are prone to add more action to keep their customers entertained.  Here we are getting a lot closer to propaganda, because the propagandist knows that interesting stories get a lot more attention than boring ones.

But propaganda is intentional fake news to get a predictable response from the people.  Do we have examples?  Sure!  Many of us believe that Mark Anthony (the ancient Rome guy, not the singer) was a drunk and a womanizer, but this portrayal is likely due to propaganda of the times.  Many people today still believe that Protestants were tortured and murdered by the thousands during the Spanish Inquisition, but this is all propaganda from the Dutch who were under Spanish rule at the time.  This was the beginning of the moveable type printing press, so pamphlets were all of a sudden easy to produce, and the people of the time weren’t ready to understand that just because it was printed it did not have to be true.  (This is unlike the internet where absolutely everything is true, especially when the facts contradict themselves.)  Many of the stories of the American Indians being the chief scalpers in the history of America are also based in propaganda, but because some of the Indians seem to have believed the propaganda too, there is a lot of mixed up information.

So what does it do?  Well, strong enough propaganda can be used to rile up the people (actually the mob) to commit acts of violence.  Want to get someone lynched?  Make up a lie about them killing a baby.  Chances are the whole town will turn out to not only lynch the accused, but his whole family as well, and possibly everyone else of his race or creed.  This isn’t just a theory; there are many examples throughout history where this happened.

But to what motive?  Why would someone stir up a bunch of propaganda?  For all sorts of reasons, and not all of them are necessarily bad.  Most often the minor propaganda stories are all about ego.  Someone went off to war and comes back telling everyone the most exaggerated stories about his accomplishments.  Is this propaganda?  It is if he’s using those stories to try and get himself elected to an office or maybe appointed to be sheriff.

But that’s tiny.  What’s a big use?  Well, we are focusing on world wars and especially religious wars right now, and this is probably where you see the biggest use of propaganda.  You see the enemy isn’t just the enemy.  They aren’t just other people.  No, they’re cannibals.  They’re rapists.  They use the blood of infants in their religious rites.  These are a people so evil that you need to go grab your hunting bow and come with us to kill them all before they eat your babies.

That’s the main point of propaganda - to get the populace so angry against a political enemy that they are willing to go to war, risk their lives, and kill the enemy.  In order to get this to work, the propagandists want “you” to think the enemy is evil, but they are also dumb.  After all, if they actually were ogres, which is possible in a fantasy setting, then they would be really tough to kill.  Being afraid of the enemy in battle doesn’t help, so they have to be stupid and easy to kill.

Time for a Fletnern example.  The Miracle at Zembmior is when the war god Manoto “threw” a giant “space golem” at a village he was angry at.  The war god Horroag (from another pantheon) put a huge shield in the way and both the golem and the shield shattered into millions of pieces.  The village was saved.

It was pretty easy for the propagandists to say Horroag triumphed over Manoto because the village was not destroyed.  Manoto is evil because he tried to kill all those “innocent” people.  After all, there were women and children still in the village.  But he’s not just evil, he’s stupid, because he failed.  And he’s a tyrant because he was trying to force the people of Zembmior to worship him.  See!  This god is so bad, and his followers are just like him.  You need to get on a ship and sail over there to liberate these poor villagers from this evil god!

Wow!  I wrote the whole thing and I want to get on a boat and go kill the followers of Manoto.  If this example of propaganda shows us anything, it shows us that there may just be a kernel of truth hidden in the lies being spread.  That makes it easier to believe and tougher to denounce.  Was Manoto defeated?  No, he wanted the ... but the village is still there.  Well, yeah, but ... and he tried to destroy it.  Well, probably not, but ... That means he lost and they won end of story!  Arguing against propaganda is never easy!

Remember that propaganda works.  It works best when it plays on beliefs (accurate or not) already in existence, especially if they can include that kernel of truth, though this is not always a requirement.  And when you’re fighting a war, the truth may not be as important as the emotion you want to generate.

This post was written as part of the soon to be released Paladin vs. Paladin aka All About Holy Wars, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one details everything having to do with paladins aka holy knights as well as the holy wars they fight in, even if those wars are against other paladins (which is when they are the most fun!).

To get the full Game Masters’ edition when it is published, you will need to be a part of our Patreon project.  There will be no free version of this edition.  Seeing as this is a double sized edition (at least over 80 pages) and the culmination of most of the last year (plus) of Small Bites editions, anyone who has been getting involved in our Small Bites project is going to want to have this edition.  Interested?  Click the link here.

Is a War Like a Dungeon?

Let’s consider an adventuring party fighting in a war.  By war, we mean that there are multiple battles, a huge number of troops in the same vicinity, some manner of opposing sides (at least two), and some manner of objective, even if it is “kill all the other guys”.  That should sound like a war to you, right?  The important difference here is that we’re talking about a war and not about a single battle.

Nearly every game master knows how to run a dungeon.  They’re great!  They’re typically linear, so the party of adventurers needs to pass from one encounter to the next in an organized and pre-determined order.  Nothing could be easier (at least nothing involving herding a bunch of player characters).

So can that be accomplished in a war zone?  No.  It cannot.  BUT!!  Some of it can.  Let’s focus on what can be generally the same.

A war zone can be run like a dungeon, or at least a wilderness adventure.  First, you need a fairly detailed map of the war zone.  The only reason this is harder than the dungeon is that it is far larger.  You can map a dungeon down to 5’x5’ squares, but a war zone is at least a couple hundred acres.

What can often work here is to have the big overall map and then get more detailed in the villages.  Even if you have to use the same village map to represent more than one place, that’s OK.  Often, just turning the map so the players enter from a different direction can be enough to eliminate any advantage they might get from using the same map multiple times.

But clearly a dungeon isn’t only a map.  It is at least a map with descriptions of where the monsters are.  That’s really what we’re going after in this post.  Often times, it is possible to simply see the war zone as a dungeon and place your enemy forces (and allied forces) where they should be.  When the party gets to a new village, which side owns the village now?  Who has troops there?  What troops are there?

Just like a dungeon encounter, knowing what the stats are for these folks and what they are likely to be doing when the party arrives is what you need to run that encounter / fight.  But that is the common problem with some dungeons - the enemy is just suiting there doing nothing.  This actually works in a war zone.  Soldiers sitting around doing nothing is called “guard duty”. Depending on the soldiers and their officers, shows exactly what they would be doing during these times.

But here is the main thing that has to be considered:  wandering monsters.  Hopefully, when you run a dungeon adventure, if the party sits still for any length of time, the monsters in the dungeon may be encountered as wandering monsters.  They don’t just sit 15’ away from a party of fresh meat and wait to be attacked.  They have some basic level of curiosity or at least self-preservation and try to be aware of their environment.

War zone “dungeons” need to be far more active.  If the party attacks a village and defeats the small squad of soldiers left there to protect the place, the others in the army need to react.  Reacting might be posting more sentries.  It might be organizing several squads to begin patrolling the region.  It might be consolidating forces so they can better deal with a group capable of picking them off one squad at a time.  Most likely, these will be the escalating reactions to continued losses to the party.

But there are a lot more things going on as well.  Messengers are carrying orders from place to place.  Well protected officers will be moving around to inspect the troops.  Logistics and supplies will be moving around, whether that is getting arrows to archers or collecting the food stuffs the various squads have “collected” from the locals.  An army doesn’t sit completely still.  (Neither should a dungeon, but that’s another post.)

But one of the most important differences between this style of war zone and a dungeon is that the encounters cannot be executed in a linear fashion.  Assuming you did actually lay out the war zone in this dungeon-like fashion, the party can slip past certain encounters and into others that you thought should be handled later.

You are the GM.  To a degree, you can just decide that the first encounter they have will be X, then Y then Z no matter what they do on the map, but players have a nasty habit of not following a GM’s script.  If the first encounter is intended to be with a messenger, the party (at least every party I’ve ever GMed) will hide in the wilderness and refuse to go anywhere near the roads.  So let’s just agree, that you won’t be able to control the order the encounters occur in.

Is this the best way to run a war zone?  Probably not, but it just might be the easiest.  It will be very important that you work out ahead of time what the reaction to certain party actions will be.  If a village on the outskirts is attacked, what will the army do?  How will the top officers know?  If a village they thought was protected or “behind the lines” gets hit, how will the respond?

The other thing is that wandering monsters list.  Who is moving around the territory?  When a party is in a war zone, they should expect to encounter the enemy often, but how?  What do patrols look like and how many are there?  Do they fight first or signal first?  Is one of them expected to flee from any encounter to make sure the bosses get word?

How are they moving their supplies around?  An active group of adventurers aka saboteurs could cause a great deal of havoc simply by attacking and burning the rations that were supposed to be delivered to the troops.  Is the enemy utilizing simple patrols of soldiers or active anti-saboteur groups?  These are things that can be pre-determined and then sprung on the party either seemingly randomly or actually randomly.  It’s not as though you need to have the messenger’s route detailed on your map and he will be at exactly this spot every day at exactly this time.  That would be an incredible amount of planning.  But still, knowing that there are six messengers who each try to hit eight villages in a day to check on the troops there - That can give you an idea of how much time the party has to attack and get away before their work is discovered.

Real wars are nothing like the controlled setting of a dungeon, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use some of the same concepts to make your FRPG war zones both active and controlled.

This post was written as part of the soon to be released Paladin vs. Paladin aka All About Holy Wars, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one details everything having to do with paladins aka holy knights as well as the holy wars they fight in, even if those wars are against other paladins (which is when they are the most fun!).

To get the full Game Masters’ edition when it is published, you will need to be a part of our Patreon project.  There will be no free version of this edition.  Seeing as this is a double sized edition (at least over 80 pages) and the culmination of most of the last year (plus) of Small Bites editions, anyone who has been getting involved in our Small Bites project is going to want to have this edition.  Interested?  Click the link here.

Why Keep a Calendar?

Back in our post Importance of Calendar (probably needed an extra “a” in there), we kind of went on generically about how a calendar allows you to figure out what season you’re in, what holidays and events are coming up, and how much to charge your PCs for stabling horses, etc.  That’s all important stuff, but when there’s a war going on, the calendar becomes a lot more important!

Let’s just use the Holy War of Fletnern for an example.  On 10/20/658P, a “space golem” crashed into a 30’d metal disc (“shield”) suspended in the sky over the town of Zembmior and the Holy War was on.

No matter what the PCs are doing in the campaign, there is a matter of time before they will be able to take certain advantages.  For example, there was a smelter nearby, but he couldn’t handle the bulk of the ore in his little portable smelter.  Plus, after the pieces of the space golem were smelted for their metal, that metal has to be worked.  So there is a time frame when the players can start to get a hold of adamant steel gauntlets, and later other adamant steel items, but not before.

An angel of death bled into some bandages.  Those bandages were rushed to the city of Helatia where the angel blood was added to healing potions.  But the players can only get the super powered healing potions if they go to Helatia after the alchemists have had a chance to work on the potions.

The Senate of Helatia banished the Warriors of the Faith from the city after their soldiers attacked several local villages.  So up to a certain date the WotF were based in the cathedral they had built in Helatia, but after that they needed to go elsewhere.  This will be a major impact to any allies of the WotF trying to find them in Helatia.

It’s a war.  There are battles going on in different areas.  Often, there are patrols from the competing sides out in the countryside.  That means allies could have help, and enemies will be attacked.  Knowing what day it is so you (as GM) know where the enemy patrols are is vitally important for running the campaign.

We glossed over the Miracle at Zembmior earlier, but the day of the collision, there were ore and shield shards scattered all over the area.  But it was less than a couple of days later that armed bands tried to snatch up as much of the metal and ore as they could.  A week later, there was even less.  As GM, you need your calendar or you don’t know what day it is and you don’t know what the debris field looks like right now.

Being able to track where important people or units are is important to the game.  If reinforcements are coming, then as GM, you need to know when they arrive.  Can the PCs attack before the reinforcements get there?  Can the reinforcements get to a village before the enemy does?  If the PCs are defending, how long must they hold out?  Do they have food and water in order to do that?  You can’t really run a siege if you don’t know how much food they have or how long it will last them.

Calendars are vital in any campaign in hopes of keeping some manner of order.  They are so much more important in a complicated story line like a war where distances between places and the number of hours or days it takes to travel really count.  Maybe not everything needs to be recorded on the calendar, but knowing the order of things and the time passing is incredibly important to your sanity.

This post was written as part of the soon to be released Paladin vs. Paladin aka All About Holy Wars, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one details everything having to do with paladins aka holy knights as well as the holy wars they fight in, even if those wars are against other paladins (which is when they are the most fun!).

To get the full Game Masters’ edition when it is published, you will need to be a part of our Patreon project.  There will be no free version of this edition.  Seeing as this is a double sized edition (at least over 80 pages) and the culmination of most of the last year (plus) of Small Bites editions, anyone who has been getting involved in our Small Bites project is going to want to have this edition.  Interested?  Click the link here.

Can a party of adventurers win a war?

One of the toughest things to do in a fantasy game is to determine how much impact a small number of adventurers can have on the world.  There are those missions where the party might save the world by killing a small group of cultists before they can allow an army of demons in, but those are not huge news stories, as very few people are ever made aware of the fact that they did it.

But adventurers playing a part in a war is always difficult to handle.  Few role-playing games are truly capable of intelligently placing adventurers in the middle of battles.  No matter how good they are, can they really slaughter so many enemy soldiers that they can turn the tide of the battle, and if they can, does that mean there is something wrong with your rules?

At risk for getting too far down a tangent here - part of the reason is that even the greatest strategist of historic warfare cannot properly encompass the massive differences that magic would bring to a battle.  Sure, the rule book will tell you exactly how big a fireball is and how much damage it will cause, but do we truly know what the other side would do when they expect there to be a mage on the battlefield?  What anti-magic strategies are anticipated and used?  Is it snipers?  counter mages?  divine magic?

OK, but back to a party amongst thousands - As a game master, are the outcomes of wars based on how well the player characters do, and should they be?

In my games, most often, just before the battle, the party’s side learns of some dirty trick the other side is going to try and they are sent off to stop it from working.  These turn into controllable adventures instead of being massively chaotic battles - something I as a GM am not capable of handling.  That has always been my advice for these things.

But there have been times in my world when that didn’t matter.  During the Battle of Brinston, I had two parties on the wall meeting the onslaught head on.  They were supposed to retreat; I had it all worked out.  But they didn’t.  They held their small section of the wall.  They were asking the citizens still in the area for help, like when they needed to get the wounded out of the way for a short time while the healers worked on them.  I personally found their self-sacrifice so inspiring that I had it inspire the locals as well, and by the time the army got there to relieve them, they had old veterans, police, and even some poachers on the wall fighting alongside of them.

But did they change the course of the war?  No.  The army was always planned to come in towards the end, so the ending was predetermined.  Still, they fought a hell of a fight.

In the Conquering War, a party was there in Parnania when the Latvich and orcs attacked.  They never stood a chance.  They were completely overwhelmed, on purpose.  But we had a great time having them race through the city, trying to slow down the juggernaut that was the Latvich war machine.  There were roof top battles, alleyway battles (that I never thought they’d survive), and magic erupting in the wrong places.  By that, I mean that the generals realized that there was fighting going on in the wrong sectors of the city and they diverted troops to figure it out.  So the party accomplished their mission.  They caused enough of a problem for the attackers that they slowed down the advance, allowing more people to escape.

Did they change the course of the war?  No!  But they accomplished their mission nonetheless.

Last one - The Elf Dwarf War.  At the time, the main party we were playing was utilizing fortune tellers a lot.  They realized that the elves were planning an ambush for the dwarves.  Now the dwarves knew they were going to have to fight at the castle they were coming up to, and they were planning for it.  What they didn’t know is that nearly every elven battle mage in that region had been concentrated at that one castle.

All the elven scouts were watching the dwarven army, leaving scant few on the roof of the castle.  So the party flew in, silently killed the sentries and invaded the castle from the roof tops.  HUGE battles!  The party eventually was forced to retreat (see that actually can happen in a role-playing game), but not before they had killed a quarter to a third of the battle mages inside the castle.  Not only that, but this was the night before the battle was to take place, so the mages still alive were depleted, at least to a degree.  One other thing that I put in - The battle mages were demoralized.  These were elven nobles.  They weren’t used to people actually attacking them, or killing them.  When they joined the battle, they did so in a far more conservative manner than they would have if they were high on killing dwarves.

Did they change the course of the war?  YES!  The dwarves were supposed to have taken the castle but been so depleted that they had to stop there and wait for reinforcements (and the politics of the time would have held those up for quite some time).  By allowing the dwarves a stronger victory there, the party allowed the dwarves to press on and eventually assault the elven capital (though they only damaged it - they never intended to try and take it).  After this one, I needed to rewrite a huge amount of the outcome of that war, because it had legitimately changed.

So what about the Holy War?  Can a party of adventurers on either side truly change the outcome of the war?  I don’t think so.  We’re talking about gods here.  I have not yet seen what a small group of mortals might be able to do to change the course of a war of the gods.  You want my advice though?  Politics!  A small group will not turn the tides of the war, but a dedicated push to convince people and governments to get more involved than I have planned could put enough people into play to change the course of the battles and change the course of the war.  Not that I think it will happen!

Avatars, Angels & Demigods

When a divine really wants to make an impact on the mortal world, there are various tools or devices they can use to communicate or enact their wills.  On Fletnern, the various different pantheons tend to use different means to these ends:

Dinsthain - The Dinsthain pantheon uses avatars, as seen in Manoto’s avatar of 652P.  This is mainly because the pantheon has a large number of gods.  With this many gods, having one weaken himself/herself for a short time is not dangerous because the others can watch out for the weakened god while the avatar is in the mortal realm.  (Creating an avatar splits the god’s power between him and his avatar thus weakening the god for a time.)  When looked at from the eternal point of view of the gods, this is an incredibly short term risk for long term results.  Some of these avatars are raised to demi-gods after their work in the mortal world is over, while others are absorbed back into the “parent” god.

Jemmistake - There are a relatively small number of Jemmistake gods, but that is how they desire it.  Therefore, they use angels and other minions in order to convey their wishes.  Despite having far fewer followers than the Dinsthain pantheon, the Jemmistake gods will likely have about the same number of minions active in the mortal realm at any given time.  In addition, Jemmistake minions will be far more likely to reveal themselves and their true natures.

Latvich - In the past, the Latvich gods have used demi-gods - avatars that are elevated to true godhood very early on.  While these demi-gods will not stay in the mortal realms for very long (typically only about a year), they can get quite a bit done.

One oddity about the demi-gods is that the Latvich find it perfectly normal that the gods would want to procreate with mortals, while other cultures find this somewhat distasteful.  The Latvich pantheon is also few in number, but by placing these demi-gods in the mortal world, they are able to create a religion and following for themselves.  Then when they take their place in the heavens, they will have a group of worshipers who will help to maintain them, thus expanding the pantheon.

Elven - The elven gods are perhaps the most standoffish and distant of all the gods.  While they do reward mortals who follow their teachings, their emphasis is far more often on things other than the mortals themselves.  They are not known to have ever placed an avatar in the mortal world, though it is possible this happened before history began to record such things.

Dwarven - The dwarven gods are declining due to the communist government in Rock Cove.  Because they are losing power quickly, they will often make their desires known to their more faithful followers personally.  As long as this divine intervention on the mortal plane is directly focused only on the dwarves and their regions, the other gods are not willing to step in and interfere, but amongst the gods themselves, this sort of direct communication is viewed as unseemly.

Oops - More Mages

We forgot to link the new Player Guide to the Magical Universities of Brinston.  Click this link in order to download the FREE quickie guide.  It’s only one page, but it can be a great little handout to get your players where they need to be.

http://www.boardenterprises.com/fletnern.html