The CritFail.Post - Issue 001
A Level 1 Newsletter
Hello and welcome to the inaugural issue of the official CritFail.Press Newsletter!
Introductions
As the title indicates, this is the first official release of a Newsletter from CritFail.Press! That being the case we think introductions are in order. CritFail Press is a small TTRPG company focused on making adventures and supplements to help Game Masters run the best possible games they can.
We love the variety of systems and themes that exist in the TTRPG hobby today and don't limit our selves to reading and writing for only one.
Through this newsletter you can expect to receive a steady flow of articles and insights on specific topics of the entire TTRPG hobby. It may be advice on running games, discussions about upcoming product releases by CritFail and others, reviews of some of our favorite TTRPG products and more.
Every Issue will contain slightly different content, as any good Newsletter should, but here's just a few things you can expect to find.
Blog
You will always find a recent article from one of the CritFail Press team in each Newsletter. These will eventually make there way over to the main blog roll on the CritFail.Press website.
The 3x5 Card
A collection of useful reference material for your games that we have found around the internet. These Issues of the CritFail Post will contain 3 different categories of links, with 5 links per category with a short write-up describing them. See below for this Issue's lists.
Adventure/Setting Content
Other Issues will include a short adventure or gazetteer that you can use in your own campaigns. Adventure content will generally be system-neutral, but may also be presented for a specific TTRPG from time-to-time. The next Issue contains a short adventure called The Sunken Lair of the Bog Druid!
And So Much More!
The items listed above are just a taste of what we hope to provide through this newsletter. We want to help you engage with this hobby we love and to empower Game Masters to run the best games they can. Check out the rest of Issue 001 below and drop us a line at social@critfail.press and let us know what you'd like to see in the future!
The 3x5 Card
5 Blog Articles
- Dyson from Dyson's Dodecahedron shared a cool wolf-hunting axe they created, complete with art.
- Teos Abadía of Alphastream.org has great advice on how to experience a new RPG in just 4 steps.
- Merric Blackman of Merric's Musings presented his ranking of all of the official D&D 5E adventures release prior to the release of Vecna: Eve of Ruin a few months ago. He has run many of the adventures discussed and has some unique insights.
- Mike Shea of Sly Flourish provided some useful tips on utilizing the Advantage and Disadvantage mechanic. While nominally focused on the 5E ruleset, it's good advice for any system with a similar mechanic.
- DMDavid suggested never having monsters make checks, but rather the players do all the rolling, similar to the Cypher System ruleset. It may not be an approach that works for everyone, but definitely a novel idea nonetheless.
5 TTRPG Books/PDFs
- Get started playing Shadowdark RPG with the free Quickstart Set. It comes in two documents: a Player's Guide for levels 1-3 of play, and a Game Master's Guide. It's a great way to get started with Shadowdark RPG and could easily be used on its own for many sessions of dangerous and deadly dungeon crawling.
- Vecna: Eve of Ruin The capstone adventure for the 2014 Edition of Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons takes Player Characters on a scenic tour of many of the games most well known and well-loved settings including Spelljammer, Eberron, Planescape, and even Greyhawk as they attempt to thwart Vecna's nefarious plots.
- Fallout: The Roleplaying Game RPG - Quickstart Guide allows you to jump on the Fallout hype train and have your own adventures in the Wasteland. The Quickstart includes an exciting adventure involving a downed Brotherhood of Steel vertibird. It does suffer from a few missing statblocks for some enemies, so you will have to improvise a little bit.
- The Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game Starter Set provides a fun evolution of the Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) system all while letting you explore the mystical setting of the hit TV shows. The Starter Set includes two adventures to let you play in either the Aang Era or the Korra Era.
- The first Tales of the Valiant adventure, Caverns of the Spore Lord sees PC's exploring a dangerous and ruined town before descending below ground, through a hostile subterranean environment. Designed for first level ToV characters.
5 Website/Programs
- Notion.so provides collaboration software that can be used to organize and share data. We can use Notion as a great way to organize our games whether its session prep or world building and due to its cloud based nature, we can access that data anywhere.
- Owlbear.rodeo is a Virtual Table Top (VTT) that is accessible for free. It's modest set of tools allows us to setup and run our games with minimal effort. It has a free tier and paid tiers for additional cloud storage, but savvy management of your assets on a local drive means you can avoid this cost if desired.
- Tabletop Audio is a great site full of free soundscapes that you can use to add ambience to your games whether online or in-person. The SoundPad feature lets you construct your own custom list of sounds from their large list of available options and save it for ongoing use.
- FigJam/Figma provides a collaborative whiteboard space for sharing and recording notes. The persistent board can be accessed on desktop or mobile and allows Players to make notes and a Game Masters can share images, maps, and other digital handouts. Also includes fun functionality like free-hand drawing and timers, that can add another layer of tensions to games (Shadowdark RPG GM's take note!)
- Token Stamp 2 is a great tool for games run online using VTT's. The tool allows you to create custom tokens based on whatever image files you have access to. You just upload your image, chose your token frame, and adjust color and text as desired. Then download the completed token and use in the VTT of your choice. Best of all, it's completely free!
Next Issue:
- Advice on adapting adventure content from any TTRPG for use in your preferred system.
- A short system-agnostic adventure called The Sunken Lair of the Bog Druid