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We survived the subclasses. We survived the wizard subclasses. Now Arcana Unleashed Part 3 asks the truly dangerous questions: What if every wizard got a Pokémon? What if every magical faction agreed that the Ninth Quill sucks? And what if an invisible imp could carry your entire adventuring party through a wall while you relax inside a genie lamp like the world's most heavily armed first-class passengers? This week, we're digging into the rest of Arcana Unleashed, including new backgrounds, feats, spells, magical factions, evolving magic items, monsters, and a dungeon puzzle whose greatest challenge is apparently identifying which end of a snake has the head. Welcome aboard Infernal Air. Please keep your arms, legs, and extraplanar vessels inside the familiar at all times. Show Notes We've covered the Arcana Unleashed subclasses. We've given Tyler an entire episode of wizard content. Now it's time to dig through everything else Wizards of the Coast packed into the book, and there is a lot more here than we expected. We start with the new Arcana Unleashed backgrounds and origin feats, where the results range from flavorful-but-forgettable to options that could seriously change how characters are built. Familiar Friend immediately gets our attention, especially once the rest of the familiar feats enter the picture. Arcane Warrior opens wizard cantrips to characters with Fighting Styles, while the new school-specific Adept feats offer spellcasters ways to steal spells and tricks from outside their usual class options. Then things get weird. Battle Familiar might be one of the strongest new D&D 2024 spells in Arcana Unleashed. It looks suspiciously like Summon Beast, except it does not require concentration, which means there is very little reason not to have one running whenever possible. Add familiar feats, Conjurer interactions, Necromancer options, and Pact of the Chain nonsense, and suddenly your adorable magical pet is an active participant in breaking the action economy. We also discover that Otherworldly Familiar lets a familiar move through walls, which naturally leads to an invisible imp carrying a Genie Warlock's vessel, and potentially the entire party, directly through the dungeon. Congratulations. You have invented Infernal Air and apparently solved dungeon crawling. The new Arcana Unleashed spells keep the chaos going. Detonation inspires the return of bag-of-rats logic, Mordenkainen's Lucubration provides an expensive way to trade higher-level spell slots for lower-level ones, and Summon Dinosaur requires very little explanation because sometimes the spell name is already doing all the work. Beyond character options, Arcana Unleashed includes advice for building magic-heavy campaign settings, creating magical traditions, defining society's relationship with magic, and using group patrons. The magical faction system expands that idea with organizations tied to each school of magic, complete with goals, renown rewards, relationships, player options, and Bastion facilities. Some are noble. Some are creepy. The Crucible Keepers apparently treat magical disasters like sporting events. The Bringers of the Cosmic Dawn have decided transmutation needed more body horror. The Covenant of the Grave gives necromancy a surprisingly thoughtful treatment. And nearly everybody hates the Ninth Quill because, as it turns out, being an organized magical crime syndicate is not a great way to make friends. We also dig into the new D&D evolving magic item rules. There are several premade examples, a simple system for upgrading items into higher-rarity versions, and a more flexible framework for adding new powers as an item grows. The concept is useful, particularly for DMs building long-term rewards, even if we wish the book gave us a lot more material to work with. Arcana Unleashed also brings back creatures like the baelnorn, introduces archmages themed around the schools of magic, and includes the level 1 adventure Tomb of the Shadow Serpents. Venger has apparently created a multiversal dungeon-based recruitment program where surviving a few traps and assembling three pieces of a snake qualifies you for employment in an evil organization. Which explains a lot about Venger's career. By the end of our Arcana Unleashed Part 3 review, the mechanics remain the strongest part of the book. The feats offer some genuinely interesting character-building options, the familiar material could have a major impact on D&D 5e character optimization, and the spells contain several standouts. The magical factions and worldbuilding material provide useful starting points for DMs, while the evolving magic item system feels like a good idea that we wish had been given more room to grow. And Battle Familiar probably needs concentration. Seriously. Key Takeaways Arcana Unleashed adds ten backgrounds and origin feats, with Familiar Friend standing out because it dramatically improves familiar survivability and unlocks the book's additional familiar feats. Arcane Warrior gives Fighters, Paladins, Rangers, and other characters with Fighting Styles access to wizard cantrips, opening up plenty of new D&D 2024 character build options. The school-specific Adept feats provide new spells and magical abilities, effectively offering lightweight versions of the eight schools of magic to characters outside the Wizard class. Battle Familiar is one of the biggest mechanical standouts in the book. Its lack of concentration creates extremely powerful interactions with familiars, summoners, Conjurer Wizards, Necromancer Wizards, and Pact of the Chain Warlocks. The Arcana Unleashed magical factions give DMs ready-made organizations for Abjuration, Conjuration, Divination, Enchantment, Evocation, Illusion, Necromancy, and Transmutation, complete with renown rewards and faction-specific Bastion facilities. The new evolving magic item rules provide a solid framework for D&D campaigns where weapons, armor, wands, and other magical equipment grow alongside their owners, although the system could use more examples and options. Tomb of the Shadow Serpents is a simple level 1 dungeon crawl built around Venger recruiting adventurers for future schemes. The loot is surprisingly generous, the encounters are straightforward, and the snake puzzle may be the greatest threat ever posed to player overthinking. Overall, Arcana Unleashed Part 3 reinforces the book's biggest strength: mechanics. The feats, spells, familiar options, and character customization tools are much stronger than the lighter worldbuilding material, and several options look likely to become significant parts of the D&D 5e 2024 optimization landscape. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Treantmonk joins us to talk about Wizards, which means we're about to spend an unreasonable amount of time discussing concentration saves, initiative bonuses, spell selection, and why standing anywhere near the enemy is a terrible lifestyle choice. We're taking the 2014 Wizard from levels 1 through 7, starting with a fragile academic who can be killed by an aggressively thrown sandwich and ending with a battlefield-control monster who can Web half the room, Fireball the other half, and still have enough magic left over to argue about which subclass is best. Along the way, we discover the Muscle Wizard, question why Medicine is still a skill, turn a spellbook into an arcane Predator drone, and once again prove that the strongest Wizard strategy is simple: Go first. Stay far away. Don't lose concentration. Easy. Show Notes Treantmonk joins Tyler, Ash, and Randall as we start building the 2014 D&D 5e Wizard from levels 1 through 7. We kick things off with ability scores, skills, defenses, and the eternal Wizard question: how much effort should you put into not immediately dying? That leads naturally into armor dips, Constitution saves, initiative, and why keeping concentration is often more important than squeezing out a little more damage. Then we get into subclasses. War Magic gets plenty of attention for its defensive tools and initiative bonus, Divination continues being Divination, Illusion gives Ash plenty to work with, and Order of Scribes eventually lets Tyler use his spellbook like a magical surveillance drone. Transmutation is also discussed. We'll leave it at that. Then comes the real Wizard experience: picking spells. Shield, Mage Armor, Find Familiar, Absorb Elements, and Magic Missile get us started before the gloves come off and everyone starts fighting over Web. From there we hit Fireball, Hypnotic Pattern, Slow, Fear, Counterspell, Tiny Hut, Summon Undead, Arcane Eye, Sickening Radiance, Greater Invisibility, Banishment, Polymorph, and enough other spells to remind everyone why building a Wizard takes three hours and a spreadsheet. By the end, one thing is very clear: Wizards don't need to solve every problem with damage. But they absolutely can. Key Takeaways The Wizard's biggest class feature is still its spell list. Your subclass matters, but your spell choices matter more. Protect your concentration. Positioning, Constitution saves, Shield, Absorb Elements, and simply refusing to stand next to angry monsters will keep your best spells running. Going first is incredibly powerful. War Magic gets a lot of love because dropping battlefield control before the enemy gets moving can completely change a fight. The classic Wizard staples are classics for a reason. Shield, Find Familiar, Mage Armor, Absorb Elements, Magic Missile, and rituals give you a ridiculous amount of mileage at low levels. Web is excellent. Everyone knows Web is excellent. This becomes a problem when multiple people are drafting spells and everybody wants Web. Third-level spells are where the Wizard really starts showing off. Fireball is Fireball, but Slow, Hypnotic Pattern, Fear, Counterspell, and other control options can be even more important depending on the fight. Don't build around a single saving throw or status effect. Having multiple ways to attack a problem keeps you useful when monsters inevitably refuse to cooperate with your favorite spell. Utility spells are a huge part of what makes Wizards so good. Scouting, teleportation, rituals, summons, battlefield control, and information gathering often solve problems before initiative is even rolled. Order of Scribes gets wonderfully weird once Manifest Mind enters the picture. Your floating spellbook can scout and act as the point of origin for your spells, turning your Wizard into a magical drone operator. And remember: dealing damage is technically a form of support if the thing threatening your party is no longer alive. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati  

Four Wizards walk into Arcana Unleashed. One teleports around insisting that swapping places is exciting. One looks like somebody's tiefling dad going through a stage-magic phase. One brings an army of disposable skeletons specifically so he can blow them up. And the last one turns into a T-Rex and starts casting Disintegrate. Somehow, this is still a more functional party than most adventuring groups we've played in. Welcome back to Arcana Unleashed, where today's lesson is simple: Wizards apparently needed more things to do. Show Notes Part Two of our Arcana Unleashed review is all Wizards, all the time, and Tyler finally gets his moment. We start with the Conjurer, which continues its identity crisis between "master summoner" and "person who is really, really enthusiastic about Misty Step." Benign Transposition and its upgrades make teleportation useful, especially once Randall figures out how to combine swapping places with summoned monsters. But the real excitement comes later, when Durable Summons, Focused Conjuration, and Splintered Summons finally let the subclass lean into what everyone actually came here for: putting more creatures on the battlefield. Then we meet the Enchanter, whose artwork immediately gets described as a middle-aged tiefling dad who took up stage magic during a midlife crisis. The subclass gets better social skills, a much more playable version of Hypnotic Gaze, and some frustratingly limited spell-twinning. Things improve considerably at higher levels, especially when Alter Memories turns magical manipulation into full-on fantasy Men in Black nonsense. Necromancer is where things get wonderfully irresponsible. Undead familiars can finally contribute, Animate Dead gets stronger, summoned undead become tougher and hit harder, and eventually your disposable corpse army becomes a collection of walking necrotic grenades. Tyler tries repeatedly to explain the mathematical shortcomings of undead attack bonuses while Ash tries repeatedly to enjoy himself despite Tyler's best efforts. Finally, the Transmuter arrives with the traditional Transmuter's Stone, some questionable attempts to make Alter Self exciting, and a substantially improved Empowered Transmutation. Things really come alive with Shapeshifter, which lets the Wizard Polymorph themselves while keeping their mental abilities and continuing to cast qualifying Transmutation spells. Which leads to the discovery nobody knew they needed: T-Rex. Casting. Disintegrate. Arcana Unleashed (affiliate link) Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall (affiliate link) Fizban's Treasure of Dragons (affiliate link) AmateurJack.com - Recovery Long Rest - Cozy D&D Business Sim Key Takeaways Conjurer is much better when it remembers that people choosing Conjurer probably want to summon things, not just teleport slightly differently. Enchanter has some weak spots, but Instinctive Charm and Alter Memories offer genuinely fun tools for manipulation, infiltration, and absolutely horrifying roleplay possibilities. Necromancer may be the standout of the bunch. Stronger undead, useful familiars, better Animate Dead support, and exploding minions finally deliver the "commander of the dead" fantasy. Transmuter still has an unhealthy emotional attachment to its rock, but Empowered Transmutation and Shapeshifter give the subclass some genuinely exciting options. The most important rules discovery of the episode is that turning into a T-Rex apparently does not prevent you from solving problems with high-level Wizard magic. Tyler likes Wizards. Ash would like Tyler to stop explaining why the things Ash likes aren't as good as Ash thinks they are. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Arcana Unleashed is here, bringing new subclasses, spells, feats, magic items, and—most importantly—fresh opportunities for Tyler to find loopholes Wizards of the Coast absolutely did not intend. In Part 1, we discover that Clerics can apparently wizard better than Wizards, the Arcane Archer has finally been upgraded from "why?" to "okay, I guess," Monks can punch people and cast spells at the same time, and Warlocks can carry around the fading remains of a dead god like a supernatural emotional-support animal. Also, somewhere at Wizards of the Coast, an editor just felt a disturbance in the Force because Tyler realized you can shoot a magical darkness arrow into someone's shield. Show Notes We kick off our review of Arcana Unleashed, the new setting-agnostic collection of character options, rules, spells, magic items, factions, monsters, and other magical nonsense for D&D. The book isn't quite Tasha's-sized, but there's plenty here to keep us busy—which is why this review is absolutely becoming a series. Part 1 is all about subclasses, starting with the Arcana Domain Cleric. The old "what if my Cleric wanted to be a Wizard?" concept finally feels like it knows what it wants to be. Great Wizard spells, a nasty saving-throw penalty through Channel Divinity, and eventually access to high-level Wizard spells make this an extremely strong hybrid. Tyler immediately starts planning for Contingency and Wish, because of course he does. Then we revisit everyone's favorite subclass to forget exists: the Arcane Archer. It is unquestionably better than the 2014 version, which unfortunately clears a bar located somewhere beneath the basement. More Arcane Shot uses, better utility ammunition, and some genuinely cool later-level abilities help, but the subclass still struggles to generate much excitement. We also spend far too long discovering that Darkening Ammunition can apparently stick to any "solid surface," which means shields, possibly whales, and whatever other nonsense your table is willing to litigate. The Warrior of Mystic Arts Monk fares much better. Mechanically, it's essentially the Monk answer to the Eldritch Knight: punch things, cast Sorcerer spells, and eventually do both with increasingly ridiculous efficiency. The old Tattooed Warrior concept may have been more flavorful, but the finished version is clean, effective, and potentially terrifying once its spellcasting and Monk abilities start feeding into each other. Finally, we meet the Vestige Patron Warlock, where your patron is also your pet because apparently the traditional Warlock power dynamic wasn't complicated enough. Your Vestige can shift between Celestial, Fiend, and Undead forms, bringing different abilities along with it, and eventually gets some impressive summoning upgrades. Ash begins thoroughly uninterested and ends up won over almost entirely by the possibility of worshipping the forgotten god of toads. Which, frankly, is the strongest possible argument for the subclass. We wrap things up before reaching the Wizard subclasses, mostly because making Tyler wait another episode to talk about Wizards is funny. Stuff for the Show Notes Arcana Unleashed (affiliate link) Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall (affiliate link) Fizban's Treasure of Dragons (affiliate link) AmateurJack.com - Recovery Long Rest - Cozy D&D Business Sim Key Takeaways Arcana Domain Cleric is excellent. It finally delivers the Cleric/Wizard hybrid fantasy without feeling like somebody stapled a spellbook onto a holy symbol. Arcane Archer is substantially improved, but "best Arcane Archer ever" still isn't the ringing endorsement Wizards probably hoped for. Darkening Ammunition should never have included the phrase "solid surface" anywhere Tyler Kamstra could see it. Warrior of Mystic Arts trades some of the Tattooed Warrior's flavor for straightforward mechanics, but those mechanics are very, very good. Spellcasting plus Monk action economy gets increasingly ridiculous at higher levels, and everybody seems fine with that. Vestige Patron is mechanically solid, narratively weird, and significantly better once you realize your patron can be the forgotten god of toads. The subclasses covered so far are generally simple, approachable, and effective without introducing a pile of unnecessary new systems. Wizards are next, assuming Ash eventually stops tormenting Tyler and allows him to talk about them. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

At level 5, the Barbarian unlocks a revolutionary new combat technique: hitting the problem twice. From there, things escalate exactly as responsible game design intended. Randall gambles his way through Wild Magic, Tyler perfects the ancient martial art of being an unbearable pain in the ass, and Ash becomes a house-sized fairy with tiny butterfly wings, a returning elemental pike, and enough reach to poke somebody from the next county. Then Brutal Critical shows up and somehow the math becomes angrier than the Barbarian. Grab your greataxe, start screaming, and remember: if smashing something once didn't work, the rules now officially support smashing it again. Show Notes We're back with the second half of our 2014 D&D 5e Barbarian builds, taking Randall's Path of Wild Magic, Ash's Path of the Giant, and Tyler's Path of the Ancestral Guardian from level 5 all the way to 20. Extra Attack immediately delivers exactly what everyone came for: more smash. From there, the builds start developing very different personalities. Randall embraces the chaos of Wild Magic and Great Weapon Master, Tyler becomes increasingly obnoxious to anything trying to hurt his friends, and Ash discovers that being a flying, increasingly enormous fairy with a throwable elemental pike is every bit as ridiculous as it sounds. We dig into Instinctive Pounce, subclass features, feat choices, Relentless Rage, Persistent Rage, and the glorious absurdity of Primal Champion. We also spend a healthy amount of time asking why Brutal Critical is supposed to be exciting when critical hits refuse to happen on command. By the end, we have battlefield control, flying giants, magical gambling, angry ancestors, Polearm Master shenanigans, and Barbarians who are extremely difficult to kill. Basically, the class gets tougher, weirder, and significantly better at solving problems with repeated applications of a large weapon. Key Takeaways Level 5 is huge. Extra Attack effectively doubles the Barbarian's basic offense, while Fast Movement helps get the angry person into smashing distance faster. Instinctive Pounce is an excellent quality-of-life feature, letting you Rage and immediately move toward whatever has made the poor decision to exist nearby. Ash's Giant Barbarian becomes increasingly ridiculous. Elemental Cleaver turns his pike into a returning elemental weapon, and later features let his flying fairy become enormous, extend his reach, and attack enemies from extremely inconvenient places. Randall's Wild Magic Barbarian is built around controlled chaos. Bolstering Magic helps attacks and ability checks, while later features let him reroll Wild Magic effects and improve his odds of getting something useful. Tyler's Ancestral Guardian becomes an excellent defender. Spirit Shield reduces damage to allies, and Vengeful Ancestors eventually makes enemies regret hurting anyone except Tyler. Brutal Critical is the problem child. The crew likes the fantasy of gigantic Barbarian crits but argues that the feature arrives too rarely and scales too poorly to carry high-level damage. Polearm Master, Great Weapon Master, and eventually Sentinel turn the builds into increasingly nasty melee threats, particularly when combined with Reckless Attack and extended reach. Relentless Rage keeps Barbarians standing after hitting zero hit points, Persistent Rage finally makes Rage easier to maintain, and Primal Champion delivers a genuinely satisfying capstone with massive Strength and Constitution boosts. The overall verdict: Barbarians remain wonderfully straightforward at their core, but the subclasses are doing a lot of the heavy lifting at higher levels. Fortunately, sometimes all you really need is Rage, Reckless Attack, and another opportunity to smash something. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall Jamesd BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Most RPG rules questions start with something reasonable, like Can I jump over this pit? or Does fireball set the curtains on fire? This one starts with a much more dangerous question: How many adventurers can we cram into one five-foot square before the rules collapse? Tyler digs into decades of D&D and Pathfinder rules looking for an answer, while Ash does increasingly questionable celebrity impressions, Randall weaponizes every edge case he can find, and Tyler's cats provide live demonstrations of why personal space is apparently optional. Show Notes This week, we're getting uncomfortably close as we dig into the surprisingly complicated rules for creatures sharing spaces. Can you walk through an ally? What about an enemy? Can a tiny creature just hang out in your square? What happens if somebody gets shoved into someone else? And, most importantly, can another player give you a piggyback ride and technically become your mount? We trace the rules from D&D 3.5 through 2014 and 2024 D&D 5e before arriving at Pathfinder 2e, comparing how each system handles movement, size differences, prone creatures, incapacitated creatures, forced movement, swarms, and all the weird situations where two creatures wind up occupying the same chunk of battlefield. Along the way, Tyler discovers that some rules are clearer than expected and others become significantly worse the longer you stare at them. Pathfinder 2e earns some praise for actually explaining what happens when creatures accidentally collide, while 2024 5e raises uncomfortable questions about exactly who falls prone and when. Meanwhile, Ash turns rules text into an excuse for a parade of impressions, Randall threatens the Grand Canyon with rules exploits, and the cats continue proving that tiny creatures respect neither game mechanics nor boundaries. DnD 3.5: Moving Through a Square DnD 5.x Shifting Combatant 5e: Moving Around Other Creatures 5.5: Moving Around Other Creatures PF2: Tactical Movement https://dicegoblin.com/  RPGBOT.Podcast Episodes Combat Maneuvers Jumping Key Takeaways D&D 3.5 was surprisingly explicit about moving through allies, enemies, helpless creatures, and creatures of dramatically different sizes. 2014 5e simplifies those rules considerably, but that simplicity creates some strange gaps when creatures accidentally or forcibly end up sharing a space. 2024 5e improves several things, especially interactions with Tiny and incapacitated creatures, but its rule about creatures falling prone when a turn ends while sharing a space creates a whole new argument about what exactly end a turn means. Pathfinder 2e gives the GM a clear answer when creatures accidentally occupy the same square: somebody gets moved, somebody may fall prone, and the GM decides how the mess gets resolved. Pathfinder 2e also handles willing creatures, unwilling creatures, prone creatures, Tiny creatures, objects, and forced movement with much more specific rules. Tumble Through exists for a reason. Forced movement in Pathfinder cannot simply put a creature somewhere it cannot normally occupy, which immediately kills several wonderfully stupid launching-people-into-the-air strategies. Swarms are the exception everyone should remember. They want to share your space because getting directly on top of you is how they ruin your day. The ultimate lesson is that creatures sharing spaces is one of those rules nobody thinks about until it happens. Then everyone stops the game, opens three rulebooks, and discovers they've been doing it differently for years. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelygm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Welcome to the Underdark, where the sun doesn't shine, everyone wants to murder you, and Wizards of the Coast has apparently decided what this place really needed was more light. Sorry, Unlight. Totally different. We've got a glowing Barbarian who can't turn off the high beams, a Rogue whose subclass starts working sometime around retirement age, a Wizard with healing powers and questionable workplace safety practices, and finally a perfectly reasonable solution to all of these problems: put a tadpole in your skull and become a Mind Flayer. Somehow, that's the part we liked. Show Notes This week, we head underground to dig through the latest Unearthed Arcana: Underdark Options, featuring three new subclasses, a Ceremorphosis feat path, and the Mind Blast spell. First up is the Path of Unlight Barbarian, a character who rages so hard they become a walking lantern. There are some genuinely useful ideas here, including radiant retaliation, blindsight, and the ability to make enemies glow, but the damage numbers struggle to keep up and several abilities feel strangely dependent on fighting invisible creatures. Worse, your Barbarian apparently has no dimmer switch, so raging in the Underdark turns you into a thirty-foot beacon advertising free adventurers to every monster nearby. Then we meet the House Agent Rogue, built around charm, betrayal, and stabbing people who thought you were their friend. The fantasy is great. The mechanics are considerably less cooperative. Several of the subclass's signature abilities depend on creatures being friendly or charmed, but the tools needed to make that happen reliably either arrive far too late or don't interact with the rules the way the subclass seems to expect. By level 17, the House Agent can finally do much of what we wanted it to do at level 3. That is one hell of an onboarding process. The Imaskari wizard fares better mechanically. It can convert elemental damage to radiant damage, spend Hit Dice to hand out temporary hit points, heal allies, remove conditions, and eventually curse enemies with Unlight until they explode. There are some strong ideas here, particularly the bonus-action healing and restoration options, but the subclass feels like several different concepts sharing an apartment because none of them could afford rent alone. And then somebody finally releases the tadpoles. The Path of Ceremorphosis is easily the most interesting material in the UA. It lets characters gradually embrace Illithid abilities through a feat tree, picking up Psionic Energy Dice, telepathy, defensive abilities, tentacles, and eventually full Ceremorphosis. At the end of the path, you can become an aberration, gain Mind Flayer abilities, and choose between eating brains or spellcasting. Choose spellcasting. Mind Blast alone makes the decision pretty easy. A massive cone, an Intelligence save, psychic damage, and the stunned condition is an incredibly nasty combination. With Psionic Energy Dice potentially letting a high-level character use it repeatedly without spending normal spell slots, this is also the part most likely to receive a visit from the balance hammer before publication. Overall, Underdark Options is a mixed bag. The Barbarian looks salvageable with better scaling and stronger flavor. The Rogue probably needs to go back to the drawing board. The Wizard works, but doesn't inspire much excitement. Ceremorphosis, however, feels like exactly the kind of weird, dangerous character option the Underdark should be giving us. The Underdark is full of Drow assassins, Illithids, Umber Hulks, ancient civilizations, horrific monsters, political intrigue, poisons, spiders, and things with entirely too many tentacles. There is plenty of material here. We're just still trying to figure out why everyone is so excited about Unlight. Key Takeaways Path of Unlight Barbarian has some solid ideas, but weak damage scaling and mandatory glowing hold it back. The subclass's reliance on blindsight and revealing invisible enemies can become very campaign-dependent. House Agent Rogue has a fantastic betrayal fantasy, but its mechanics don't reliably support that fantasy. Several important House Agent abilities arrive far too late, with some of the subclass finally functioning properly around level 17. The Imaskari wizard is probably the strongest of the three subclasses mechanically, especially as a secondary healer. Spending Hit Dice for bonus-action healing and condition removal gives the Wizard some excellent action economy. Unlight still feels underdeveloped as a concept. The hosts wanted something stranger and more distinctly Underdark. Ceremorphosis is the highlight of the UA and continues the promising idea of character paths built through feat trees. Some Ceremorphosis options are niche, especially the tentacle and brain-eating mechanics. Mind Blast is extremely powerful thanks to its large area, Intelligence save, and ability to stun. Repeated Mind Blasts fueled by Psionic Energy Dice look strong enough that they may need adjustment. The hosts generally liked the villainous path concept and want to see more options built around it. Final verdict: mixed bag. The subclasses need work, but becoming a Mind Flayer is apparently a perfectly reasonable career move. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Today we're building Barbarians, the D&D class for anyone who looked at tactical combat and thought, This needs fewer tactics and significantly more upper body strength. We've got Rage, Reckless Attack, enormous hit points, questionable wardrobe choices, and an ongoing debate over whether a shield is sensible equipment or an admission that you lack confidence in your own face. By level four, Ash has become a flying fairy giant with a pike, Tyler is weaponizing irritation, and Randall has embraced the ancient Barbarian tradition of solving probability with violence. Grab your protein shake, yell something incomprehensible, and roll initiative. SHOW NOTES In this episode of the RPGBOT.Podcast, we finally tackle the 2014 D&D 5e Barbarian from levels 1 through 4, and things immediately become louder, sweatier, and considerably less concerned with personal safety. We start with the fundamentals: Strength, Constitution, that glorious d12 Hit Die, armor choices, and why Unarmored Defense looks much better on paper than it usually works in practice. Then we get into Rage, the feature that turns getting punched in the face from a problem into something approaching a class strategy. We also talk about managing those limited early Rage uses and why running into every fight screaming may be thematically correct but mechanically questionable. At level 2, Reckless Attack gives Barbarians one of their defining tactical choices: advantage for you, advantage for everyone trying to murder you. Fortunately, Barbarians have a lot of hit points and remarkably little respect for consequences. Danger Sense adds some much-needed protection against Dexterity saves, because apparently surviving fireballs through sheer gym-bro intuition is a legitimate class feature. Level 3 brings Primal Knowledge and, more importantly, subclasses. We run through the Barbarian options, separating the powerful from the interesting and occasionally discovering that those are not the same thing. Ancestral Guardian is an effective defender but can feel repetitive, Wild Magic brings some desperately needed unpredictability, and Path of the Giant lets Ash fulfill the perfectly reasonable fantasy of playing a tiny fairy who gets angry, becomes enormous, and starts stabbing things from fifteen feet away. By level 4, the builds are taking shape. Tyler leans into Ancestral Guardian with a whip, shield, and Slasher to become an incredibly annoying battlefield defender. Randall grabs Great Weapon Master and combines it with Reckless Attack because accuracy penalties matter considerably less when you've already decided to roll everything with advantage. Ash takes Strike of the Giants, picks up a pike, and continues transforming his fairy into a flying problem with an increasingly ridiculous reach. It's everything you need to get a 2014 Barbarian through tier one: Rage management, big weapons, bigger hit points, questionable decisions, and enough tactical depth to prove that smash actually has several different settings. KEY TAKEAWAYS Strength and Constitution are the Barbarian's priorities. Dexterity helps, but investing heavily in it just to improve Unarmored Defense is usually difficult to justify. Medium armor is often better than it feels. The shirtless Barbarian fantasy is great, but half plate can save you a lot of ability-score investment. Rage is your core resource, especially at low levels when you only have a few uses. Don't waste it on fights that don't need it. Rage doesn't have to mean screaming fury. It can be cold focus, a physical transformation, magical power, or whatever fits the character. Reckless Attack is the Barbarian bargain: you get advantage on Strength-based attacks, but enemies get advantage against you. Fortunately, getting hit is already part of the job description. Danger Sense helps compensate for one of the Barbarian's defensive weaknesses by giving advantage on many Dexterity saves. Barbarians have limited utility outside combat, so backgrounds, racial abilities, and creative roleplaying can do a lot to make the character feel more rounded. Subclass power and subclass fun are not necessarily the same thing. Ancestral Guardian is strong but mechanically repetitive, while options like Wild Magic and Giant bring more toys to the table. Great Weapon Master pairs beautifully with Reckless Attack because advantage helps offset the feat's attack penalty. By level 4, the Barbarian already knows exactly what it wants to be: difficult to kill, extremely dangerous, and preferably standing much too close to whoever made the mistake of starting this fight. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

We're back with Pathfinder Wizards, and somehow giving Tyler ten more levels of spellcasting has not improved the situation. Ash has evolved from sneaky magical assassin into a nearly undetectable menace who can freeze time and ruin your life before you know he was there. Randall has discovered that there is apparently no such thing as enough bonded-item spell slots. And Tyler's angry robot can now scream at you until you die, drop meteors on your friends, and disintegrate whatever is left. At this point, these aren't adventurers. They're reasons cities have evacuation plans. SHOW NOTES We're finishing our Pathfinder 2e Wizard builds, taking Ash, Randall, and Tyler from level 11 all the way to level 20. At these levels, the Wizard starts showing exactly where its power lives. New class features are few and far between, defenses remain deeply Wizard-shaped, and some of the high-level feat choices are surprisingly thin. But the spells? The spells get ridiculous. Ash continues turning his Red Mantis Sprite into the world's most irritating magical assassin. Phantasmal Calamity wrecks minds, Redirect Teleportation makes escaping him considerably harder, Duplicate Foe lets him turn your own face against you, and his growing collection of invisibility and stealth abilities eventually makes finding him a campaign objective all by itself. By the time he picks up Disappearance and Legendary Sneak, the plan has basically become: you don't see Ash unless Ash has made a tactical error. Tyler's Rune Lord continues leaning into wrath, explosions, and increasingly hostile interpretations of spellcasting. Blinding Fury makes enemies literally too angry to perceive things properly, Falling Stars brings the expected amount of meteor-related destruction, and Scare to Death gives his angry robot the possibility of simply yelling at someone until they fall over dead. Naturally, Tyler immediately starts figuring out how to combine that with Sure Strike and Disintegrate because apparently death by terror wasn't conclusive enough. Randall keeps feeding the Universalist Wizard's bonded-item engine. Superior Bond and Reprepare Spell give him even more ways to keep spells flowing, because the answer to "When do you have enough spellcasting?" is apparently "What kind of quitter asks that question?" Along the way, we hit some of the Wizard's best high-level toys. Contingency lets you prepare for problems before they happen. Time Beacon lets you rewind a terrible turn and try again. Metallic Meteorite Glyph introduces the exciting tactical concept of repeatedly hitting someone with space rocks. Effortless Concentration frees up actions for sustained spells. Infinite Possibilities gives prepared casters a valuable wildcard when the perfect spell wasn't prepared that morning. Then we reach 10th-rank spells and restraint leaves the building. Ash stops time with Freeze Time and starts planning elaborate traps while everyone else stands around unknowingly waiting for reality to resume. Randall grabs Cataclysm because sometimes the correct number of damage types is all of them. Tyler considers Manifestation, giving him access to nearly any spell he could suddenly decide he needs. There is also an extended disagreement about line of effect after Ash discovers that Phantasmagoria cannot simply murder everyone inside a building without worrying about pesky things like walls. Apparently Pathfinder has rules specifically designed to keep Wizard war crimes within reasonable geographic boundaries. Ash takes the news well. By level 20, everyone somehow lands on Spell Shape Mastery, turning many of their favorite spell-shaping tricks into free actions. Ash becomes harder to identify, read, locate, or meaningfully interact with. Randall takes Lore specifically about Ash's Sprite, immediately putting himself on Ash's hit list. Tyler takes Too Angry to Die, because there was really no other possible ending for the angry robot. Twenty levels later, the Wizard remains exactly what it promised to be: fragile, complicated, occasionally frustrating, and capable of solving problems with a spell list large enough to qualify as infrastructure. Player Core 1 (affiliate link) Player Core 2 (affiliate link) Impossible Magic (affiliate link) Archives of Nethys Pathbuilder RPGBOT.Content Wizard Guide Wizard Ancestries and Heritages Guide Wizard Arcane Schools Guide Wizard Arcane Thesis Guide Wizard Feats Guide Remastered Arcane Spell List Guide KEY TAKEAWAYS High-level Wizards are still defined more by their spells than their class features. The Wizard's defensive and weapon progression remains painfully slow, so positioning and magical defenses continue to matter. High-level spellcasting is where the class really comes alive, with options like Contingency, Time Beacon, Phantasmal Calamity, Falling Stars, Disappearance, and a frankly unreasonable number of meteor-related solutions. Ash's Red Mantis build becomes an extremely capable infiltrator and assassin built around stealth, deception, illusions, invisibility, and making other people look responsible. Tyler's Rune Lord doubles down on damage, persistent effects, intimidation, and the general philosophy that being angry enough should eventually become a damage type. Randall's Universalist shows how powerful Drain Bonded Item can become when you keep investing in ways to recover and recycle spells. Reprepare Spell trades downtime for reusable low-rank utility, while Infinite Possibilities sacrifices some raw spell-slot power for tremendous flexibility. Effortless Concentration is an easy standout for Wizards who rely on sustained spells. Scare to Death on an angry Rune Lord is exactly as stupid and wonderful as it sounds. 10th-rank spells are deliberately limited, but Freeze Time, Cataclysm, Manifestation, and the other options make that single slot feel appropriately enormous. Spell Shape Mastery is a fantastic capstone if your build has invested heavily in spell-shaping feats. Free Archetype opens even more directions, including Rogue or Captivator for Ash's assassin, additional spellcasting options for Randall, and apparently more explosions for Tyler. Pathfinder's line-of-effect rules are all that stand between civilization and unrestricted Wizard war crimes. Most importantly, Tyler got twenty full levels of Wizard and still wanted more. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Tyler loves wizards. We know this because he told us. Repeatedly. For ninety minutes. So naturally, we gave him an entire episode to explain why the best solution to every problem is a spellbook, an alarming number of prepared spells, and occasionally sucking magical energy out of your left shoe. Meanwhile, Ash builds a tiny invisible assassin, Randall discovers that wizardry can apparently involve throwing a greatsword at someone from several hundred feet away, and everyone learns the most important rule of Pathfinder spellcasting: Fireball is a tool, not a personality. Tyler disagrees. SHOW NOTES It is finally time for Tyler's Roman Empire: Wizards. In Part 1 of our Pathfinder 2e Wizard build, we take the class from levels 1 through 10 and dig into what makes the PF2e Wizard different from its D&D 5e counterpart. Wizards are still the spellbook-carrying nerds we know and love, but their real power comes from choosing, preparing, and using the right spells rather than simply solving every encounter with Fireball. We break down Arcane Bond, including the extremely important revelation that your bonded item can technically be your left shoe, then walk through the Arcane Theses and the different ways they reshape how a Wizard manages spells. Spell Blending offers big high-rank spell slots, Spell Substitution gives prepared casters some much-needed flexibility, Experimental Spell Shaping opens up spell modification options, and Improved Familiar Attunement lets you drain magical power from your adorable animal companion without technically hurting it. Probably. Then we build three very different Wizards. Ash creates a sneaky Red Mantis spellcaster built around stealth, spying, invisibility, and framing innocent people for magical crimes. Randall embraces the School of Unified Magical Theory and somehow turns his scholarly Wizard into a man who hurls increasingly large weapons at enemies. Tyler goes full Rune Lord of Wrath because apparently simply playing a Wizard was not Wizard enough. As the builds advance, the differences become even clearer. Ash gains tools like Split Slot and Shroud of the Mantis to become an increasingly slippery magical infiltrator. Randall discovers the ridiculous potential of Bond Conservation and starts chaining recovered spells together while continuing to throw weapons at people. Tyler adds persistent fire, bleeding, spell shaping, extra spell slots earned by waking up angry, and increasingly elaborate ways to make one enemy have the worst day imaginable. By level 10, we have three Wizards who share a spell list and almost nothing else. We also discover that Ash is apparently building according to the defensive philosophy of being somewhere else when the damage happens, which leads to perhaps the purest Wizard philosophy of the episode: here for a good time, not a long time. Player Core 1 (affiliate link) Player Core 2 (affiliate link) Impossible Magic (affiliate link) Archives of Nethys Pathbuilder RPGBOT.Content Wizard Guide Wizard Ancestries and Heritages Guide Wizard Arcane Schools Guide Wizard Arcane Thesis Guide Wizard Feats Guide Remastered Arcane Spell List Guide KEY TAKEAWAYS A Pathfinder 2e Wizard is defined primarily by their spells. What you learn, prepare, and cast matters far more than simply collecting class feats. PF2e Wizards are powerful, but they do not have the enormous caster-versus-martial power gap familiar to many D&D 5e players. Fireball is good. Fireball is not the answer to every question. Tyler remains emotionally unconvinced. Arcane Bond effectively gives you another use of a prepared spell, and your bonded item can be almost anything you own, including, unfortunately, a shoe. Arcane Thesis dramatically changes how your Wizard handles spellcasting. Spell Substitution is especially forgiving if you are new to prepared spellcasting, while Spell Blending can be extremely powerful but more complicated. Arcane Schools provide curriculum spells, additional curriculum spell slots, and focus spells, while the School of Unified Magical Theory trades the curriculum for much greater flexibility with Drain Bonded Item. Wizard class feats can sometimes feel underwhelming because so much of the class's power budget lives in its spells, making Wizard an appealing class for archetype options. Ash proves that Wizards can make surprisingly effective stealth and infiltration characters. Randall proves that being a Wizard does not technically prevent you from solving problems by throwing a greatsword at them. Tyler proves that Rune Lord Wrath can turn waking up angry into an actual character resource. By level 10, the three builds demonstrate just how differently Wizards can play despite all starting from the same enormous Arcane spell list. Most importantly, Tyler loves Wizards. We know, buddy. We know. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Nature is healing. Unfortunately, nature has chosen violence. We're taking the Druid from level 5 all the way to 20, which means summoning packs of velociraptors, turning into dinosaurs, raising fungal zombies, weaponizing potted plants, becoming an angry celestial nature wizard, and eventually gaining the power to erase armies with natural disasters. But none of that matters because we discovered the true pinnacle of Druid magic: summoning cows sixty feet above our enemies and letting gravity finish the spell. Welcome to high-level Druid optimization, where Mother Nature loves you, but she has absolutely had enough of your crap. Show Notes We return to our 2014 D&D 5e Druid builds and take Tyler's Circle of Spores, Randall's Circle of the Moon, and Ash's Circle of Stars from level 5 all the way to 20. Third-level spells immediately send us down the Conjure Animals rabbit hole, where velociraptors look terrifying until someone suggests cows. From there, the entirely reasonable discussion of battlefield control becomes the Twister Gambit: summon livestock above your enemy and allow physics to contribute to the encounter. As the levels climb, the Druids only become more ridiculous. Randall gets increasingly dangerous Wild Shape options and eventually Elemental Wild Shape. Tyler builds an expanding fungal entourage while becoming increasingly difficult to kill. Meanwhile, Rain Shadow graduates from peaceful celestial hippie to terrifying flying star mage with an alarming willingness to unleash the wrath of nature. We dig through the Druid spell list, separating great options from traps, discussing Polymorph, Wall of Fire, summoning, battlefield control, Draconic Transformation, Foresight, Shapechange, and the point where spells like Earthquake and Tsunami stop feeling like combat abilities and start feeling like natural-disaster plot devices. By level 18, Beast Spells lets Druids cast while Wild Shaped, and level 20's Archdruid removes the practical limit on Wild Shape altogether. The result is a class that starts by talking to squirrels and ends as a nearly unkillable force of nature capable of turning into monsters, casting world-altering magic, and presumably still dropping cows on people whenever the situation demands it. Key Takeaways Conjure Animals remains enormously powerful, especially when quantity, Pack Tactics, battlefield control, and questionable applications of gravity get involved. The Twister Gambit proves that cows are not merely livestock. They are ammunition. Druids excel at battlefield control, with spells like Plant Growth capable of making movement extremely difficult under the right circumstances. Circle of the Moon keeps improving its Wild Shape options, eventually gaining Elemental Wild Shape and much stronger beast forms. Circle of Spores develops into a durable melee caster surrounded by fungal undead and eventually gains excellent defensive abilities. Circle of Stars becomes increasingly flexible as its Starry Forms improve, allowing Ash's Rain Shadow to become the terrifying celestial nature prophet she was always destined to be. Higher-level Druid magic increasingly shifts from winning encounters to reshaping entire situations with spells like Earthquake and Tsunami. Beast Spells dramatically changes Wild Shape by allowing Druids to cast while transformed. Foresight and Shapechange provide outstanding ninth-level options and make already-powerful Druids even harder to deal with. Archdruid's unlimited Wild Shape makes the level 20 Druid extraordinarily difficult to kill, especially for Circle of the Moon. The Druid's greatest strength is versatility. It can summon, heal, control the battlefield, transform, deal damage, support allies, infiltrate, and eventually become a walking ecological catastrophe. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Last time on Impossible Magic, we discovered that the Magus can finally move, the Summoner can finally summon, and Pathfinder's three-action economy is apparently more of a polite recommendation. Now we're back for Part 2, where Paizo hands Ash an infinite supply of disposable corpses, gives Tyler a class built entirely around weaponized graffiti, drops roughly six hundred spells on his to-do list, and introduces magic so impossible that you're legally allowed to cast it exactly once. Welcome back. Somehow, things have gotten worse for the GM. Show Notes We survived Part 1, so naturally it's time to make things significantly more complicated. We start with the Necromancer, Ash's immediate new obsession and perhaps Pathfinder's most enthusiastic endorsement of reusable corpses. Necromancers summon disposable thralls, sacrifice them to power Grave Spells, choose between the martial Reaper and thrall-heavy Puppeteer Fatal Methods, and customize their undead aesthetic through Blood, Bone, Flesh, or Spirit Grim Fascinations. Blood immediately attracts Ash's attention because apparently the correct amount of bleeding is all of it. The class also gets Mastery of Life and Death, allowing it to play surprisingly flexible games with vitality and void damage. Between healing from dead thralls, creating seas of grasping limbs, exploding minions, summoning enormous undead monstrosities, and eventually dropping a living graveyard onto the battlefield, the Necromancer delivers exactly the sort of wholesome family entertainment we expected. Then we meet the Runesmith, Pathfinder's newest experiment in making someone at the table track even more things. Runesmiths etch persistent runes onto equipment, trace temporary runes onto creatures, modify them with diacritic runes, and invoke them for additional effects. The result is a flexible new magic system with tons of room for clever combinations, action compression, buffs, debuffs, and the inevitable player who arrives with a spreadsheet explaining why drawing twelve symbols on the barbarian causes reality to explode. Or, as Tyler puts it, weaponized graffiti. From there, we explore the new Wizard schools, including enchantment-adjacent magic, divination, dimensional manipulation, and what can only reasonably be described as Minecraft Wizard. Automatons also get new options, including more durability and, most importantly, laser eyes. Then we arrive at approximately six hundred new and updated spells, which Tyler receives with the calm enthusiasm of a man watching years disappear from his life. Standouts include Bone Shield, Murder of Crows, Bone Moth's Kiss, Heartbolt, Living Thunderbolt, and the deeply important Fishing Spot, which creates an extraplanar fishing hole because sometimes saving the world can wait until after you catch a Scholar Salmon. Finally, we reach the actual Impossible Spells. These aren't conventional character options so much as campaign-level magical plot devices. They can set enormous areas on fire, erase entire periods of history, leave permanent supernatural consequences, and can generally be cast only once by a character. So despite the book's title, Impossible Magic is apparently possible. Once. We wrap up with strange rituals, spell catalysts, armor and weapon runes, grimoires, spellhearts, staves, magic tattoos, and enough other magical equipment to keep optimizers occupied until Paizo releases another book and starts the process all over again. The final verdict is overwhelmingly positive. The Necromancer is flavorful and mechanically exciting, the Runesmith introduces a genuinely different approach to magic, the spells are unusually creative, and even the archetypes and magic items feel packed with ideas worth playing. Key Takeaways Necromancer is built around disposable thralls that can attack, block space, fuel Grave Spells, and be sacrificed for increasingly ridiculous effects. Reaper supports a more martial Necromancer while Puppeteer leans harder into controlling and sacrificing thralls. Blood, Bone, Flesh, and Spirit Grim Fascinations dramatically change the flavor and utility of your thralls. Blood looks especially strong, including ways to bypass bleed immunity and regain HP when thralls die. Mastery of Life and Death gives Necromancers unusual flexibility with vitality and void effects. Runesmith introduces an entirely new magical playstyle built around etching, tracing, modifying, and invoking runes. Diacritic runes modify other runes, opening the door to increasingly elaborate combinations. Runesmith has enormous potential for optimization, especially as players discover new ways to exploit its action compression. The new Wizard schools offer some much-needed alternatives, including dimensional and terrain-manipulation themes. Automatons get additional defensive options and, critically, laser eyes. Impossible Magic includes roughly six hundred new and updated spells, ranging from genuinely useful combat magic to wonderfully bizarre options like Fishing Spot. Bone Moth's Kiss begins with a cute little moth and ends with your bones gradually becoming a medical emergency. Living Thunderbolt lets you become lightning, fly through creatures, and damage them as you pass through their spaces. Impossible Spells are primarily GM-controlled plot devices rather than normal spell selections. A character can generally use Impossible Magic only once, after which their soul is permanently marked against doing it again. The book also includes new rituals, grimoires, spellhearts, staves, catalysts, armor and weapon runes, tattoos, and other magical equipment. The overall reaction is extremely positive. Necromancer gets most of the immediate hype, but Runesmith may be the sleeper hit once players start discovering what the rune system can really do. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Impossible Magic promises to break the boundaries of spellcasting, which apparently means letting the Magus move, allowing the Summoner to actually summon things, and giving Ash even more ways to kill player characters. We've got lightning-powered sword dashes, six-action summon turns, weapons made out of your own soul, teleporting rogues, and an archetype that looks at another caster's spell and says, "Actually, I'm in charge of this now." Paizo may have called the book Impossible Magic, but after reading some of these archetypes, the only impossible thing is pretending Pathfinder still has a three-action economy. Show Notes Impossible Magic is here, and Pathfinder 2e's magic users are getting some long-overdue attention. We start with the returning Magus and Summoner, two classes that had great concepts but spent years fighting their own mechanics almost as often as they fought monsters. The Magus gets one of the biggest glow-ups. More spell slots and dramatically improved action economy mean Spellstrike finally feels like the centerpiece of the class instead of an elaborate three-action hostage situation. New options like Running Recharge, Sprinting Spellstrike, Twofold Twine, and the gun-toting Volatile Spark make the class more mobile, flexible, and gloriously anime. Then we tackle the Summoner, which has accomplished the revolutionary feat of becoming good at summoning. Expanded spellcasting means you can actually spend spell slots on summons without feeling like you just burned half your daily resources. Combined with Act Together, an Eidolon, and summoned creatures, the class can start doing deeply irresponsible things with the action economy. Just remember: summon creatures for useful abilities, not just attacks. Unicorn healthcare is apparently the future. We finish by digging into Impossible Magic's archetypes. Captivator weaponizes being ridiculously charming, Hedge Mage becomes the master of an absurd number of little spells, Living Nexus eats magic and turns it into violence, and Soulforger gives you a magical weapon powered by your convictions and potentially your terrible life choices. Spell Shifter gets especially weird by manipulating spells already in play, while Veil Dancer offers teleportation, concealment, and stabbing people from gaps in reality. World Rouser rounds things out by turning the surrounding environment into a growing magical support zone. And somehow, despite spending more than an hour on all of that, we still barely scratched the book. Key Takeaways Magus is dramatically better thanks to more spell slots and major improvements to its action economy. Running Recharge looks like an extremely strong Magus option because it combines movement with recharging Spellstrike. New Magus options lean heavily into the class fantasy, including dual weapons, firearms, area Spellstrikes, and extremely anime movement abilities. Summoner finally has enough spellcasting to actually summon creatures without sacrificing most of its daily resources. Act Together combined with an Eidolon and summoned creatures can produce some spectacular action-economy nonsense. Utility summons may outperform creatures chosen purely for damage. Healing, spellcasting, and special abilities are where summoning really shines. Hedge Mage is built around mastering low-rank magic, cantrips, and heightened spells rather than gaining a traditional collection of high-rank spells. Soulforger is extremely flavorful and potentially powerful, but brings enough rules and subsystems that it practically deserves its own episode. Spell Shifter can manipulate ongoing magic by sustaining, redirecting, altering, or dismantling spells, making it one of the book's most unusual archetypes. Veil Dancer is essentially teleportation plus stealth plus stabbing, or as the episode puts it, a little bit of Misty Step: The Archetype. Impossible Magic appears very willing to bend Pathfinder 2e's sacred three-action economy in the name of making magic more fun. The overall verdict is strongly positive: there is a lot of mechanically interesting, flavorful material here, and there is far too much of it to cover in one episode. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Druids are what happens when a wizard looks at civilization and decides indoor plumbing was a mistake. You get questionable armor, inexplicable scimitar proficiency, the ability to become a bear, and a secret language apparently reserved for people who think Elvish is too mainstream. This week we build three dirt wizards, including an emo mushroom warrior, a cosmic hippie named Rain Shadow, and a Moon Druid who discovers that inside him there are apparently two wolves per short rest. Nature is healing. Unfortunately, it has also prepared Spike Growth. Show Notes We're digging into the 2014 DnD 5e Druid from levels 1 through 4, starting with ability scores, weapons, armor, spellcasting, and the ancient mystery of why Druids can wield metal scimitars but get weird about metal armor. We also confront Druidic, the secret language nobody asked for, before getting into the real reason most people showed up: Wild Shape. At level 2, we break down the Druid Circles and discover that not all hippies are created equal. Tyler embraces complexity with Circle of Spores and begins his transformation into an angry mushroom with a stick. Ash creates Rain Shadow, a Circle of Stars Druid fueled by cosmic energy, Guiding Bolt, and an aura that desperately needs balancing. Randall chooses Circle of the Moon because sometimes optimization means turning into a bear and eating the problem. By levels 3 and 4, second-level spells bring control options like Spike Growth, summoning gets increasingly useful, and the builds start finding their identities. We talk feats, Wild Shape tactics, concentration, battlefield control, and why a group of Druids working together might actually be more frightening than whatever encounter the DM prepared. Key Takeaways Wisdom comes first, with Dexterity and Constitution doing important work keeping your poorly armored nature wizard alive. Druidic is basically Thieves' Cant for people who compost, and the episode's theory that it is Elvish for hipsters remains disturbingly plausible. Wild Shape varies enormously by subclass. Moon Druids turn it into a major combat tool, while other Druids often have better uses for those resources. Circle of Stars is exceptionally versatile, offering damage, healing, and better concentration through its Starry Forms. Circle of Spores can be powerful but complicated, rewarding careful building while offering plenty of opportunities to accidentally build an underperforming mushroom. Circle of the Moon is the straightforward animal violence option, especially at low levels when Wild Shape provides a ridiculous pile of extra hit points. Spike Growth is fantastic battlefield control, particularly when combined with summoned creatures, mobile Wild Shapes, and party members waiting to maul anything that escapes. At level 4, the builds take shape: Tyler goes Spores, Ash goes Stars, and Randall goes Moon, proving there are at least three completely different ways to weaponize a hike through the woods.

After five episodes of Cyberpunk RED, we have finally reached the most dangerous part of Night City: giving each other constructive feedback. Randall begins with I mechanically didn't like this game, Tyler discovers he spent all his money on software that was permanently deleted, and Ash admits the five-page cheat sheet has ceased to meet any reasonable definition of cheat sheet. But somewhere between the action-economy arguments, cyberpsychosis, crushing rent payments, and the revelation that Tyler still wants to be a wizard even in a game without wizards, we arrive at an important conclusion: the vibes are immaculate, the rules are complicated, and apparently the real Cyberpunk experience is deciding whether to pay rent or install cooler robot parts. Show Notes We close out our Cyberpunk RED Quickstart with a full debrief of the system, the actual play, what worked, what didn't, and what we probably would have done differently if we had more time in Night City. Randall opens strong by saying he mechanically didn't like the game, but that position gets considerably more complicated as the discussion continues. The D10 itself wasn't the problem. In fact, the group generally liked the smaller die combined with large skill modifiers. When your character is good at something, they are really good at it, and that makes each role feel distinct. Combat also delivered the quick, dangerous feeling they expected, with armor degrading, damage piling up, and one bad decision potentially turning into a very short career. The biggest mechanical discussion is Netrunning. Everyone agrees that it is cool, but it creates an unusual action-economy problem. Dave could take three Net Actions plus a meat-space action while Marky might spend his entire turn doing something like hitting a guy with a chainsaw. That can make the Netrunner feel like they are playing an entire second game while everyone else waits for their turn. At the same time, the actual damage and effectiveness didn't necessarily feel unbalanced. Marky often accomplished more with his one physical action than Dave did with several Net Actions. The bigger issue was spotlight and pacing. The group thinks Netrunning would probably feel better when paired with simultaneous social challenges, physical objectives, security problems, and other jobs for the rest of the party instead of simply running two parallel combats. That leads into one of the biggest lessons from the actual play. Cyberpunk RED may work much better with a larger crew. A four-person team could have a Rockerboy distracting someone, a Solo handling security, a Tech solving a physical problem, and a Netrunner diving into the architecture at the same time. With only Marky and Dave, there were fewer opportunities to demonstrate that kind of coordinated job. They also acknowledge that years of D&D and Pathfinder trained everyone to solve problems by eventually rolling initiative. Cyberpunk seems to reward a different mindset. Talk first, manipulate the situation, use contacts, exploit skills, plan the job, and only start shooting when the plan inevitably catches fire. The skill system gets mixed reactions. The large modifiers make specialization feel meaningful, but there are a lot of skills, some of which feel extremely specific. Add difficulty values, environmental penalties, equipment penalties, conditions, combat rules, armor, range bands, critical injuries, and everything else, and Ash notes that the cheat sheet alone is five pages long. At that point, it is no longer a cheat sheet. It is another book. Cyberware is one of the systems everyone wishes they had more time to explore. Buying upgrades, improving your body, choosing programs, and slowly building a character over multiple jobs sounds like one of Cyberpunk RED's biggest rewards. The problem is that every improvement comes with pressure from Humanity and Empathy. The better the chrome gets, the more carefully you need to consider how much of yourself you are willing to sacrifice. That tension becomes even more interesting in a longer campaign. Cyberpunk RED has rent, lifestyle expenses, unexpected bills, jobs, downtime, gear upgrades, cyberware, and the constant temptation to spend tomorrow's survival money on something that might help you survive tonight. Do you pay rent, or buy the implant that might make the next job successful enough to solve the rent problem later? As Randall points out, that sounds suspiciously like real life. Ash clarifies that the fantasy is that sometimes you actually get to win. The group increasingly comes around to the idea that Cyberpunk RED is less a combat simulator and more a Night City life simulator. A long campaign built around episodic jobs, rival crews, personal contacts, planning between sessions, upgrading equipment, and roleplaying downtime could bring out parts of the system that a short Quickstart simply cannot. Randall especially likes the idea of extending that experience beyond game night. A campaign Discord could become part of Night City, with characters hearing about jobs, talking to contacts, gathering clues, competing with rival crews, and planning a heist during the week before everyone sits down to execute it. The conversation eventually moves from mechanics to the thing everyone seems to agree Cyberpunk absolutely nails: the world. Randall loves the gig-economy structure and the importance of personal networks. In a world where institutions have largely failed you, the people you know matter. Your friends, family, contacts, crew, and community become the thing keeping you alive. Ash takes that idea even further. Cyberpunk may look nihilistic from the outside, but the point isn't that nothing matters. The world is rigged, corporations control everything, society may never improve, and your story may end badly. Your friends still matter. Your community still matters. The time you have with them still matters. That, more than the chrome, guns, Black ICE, or chainsaw hands, becomes the group's real takeaway from Cyberpunk RED. The setting is bleak because caring about people in a world designed to grind them down makes those relationships matter even more. And naturally, the episode ends with chat comparing Cyberpunk and Shadowrun, Ash being accused of practicing trickle-down hero-point economics, and Tyler floating Shadowrun as a future Quickstart. Because apparently five episodes of dystopian corporate misery were not enough. Key Takeaways The vibes are immaculate. Even when the group disagreed with individual mechanics, everyone responded positively to Night City, the lore, cyberware, jobs, and overall Cyberpunk atmosphere. The D10 system worked better than expected. Large modifiers mean characters feel genuinely specialized, while the smaller die keeps results uncertain without making experts suddenly incompetent. Combat feels dangerous. Armor degradation and substantial damage support the fast, dirty, lethal tone the group expected from Cyberpunk RED. Netrunning is cool but creates spotlight problems. Three Net Actions plus a meat action can make the Netrunner appear to be playing considerably more game than everyone else. The action economy may be less unbalanced than it looks. Marky often accomplished more physical damage with one action than Dave accomplished with several Net Actions. The real issue was how much table time each character received. Netrunning probably works best as part of a larger encounter. Mixing hacking with social manipulation, physical objectives, security challenges, and combat would give the rest of the crew meaningful things to accomplish at the same time. A larger party might showcase the system better. Four characters with different roles could divide responsibilities during a job and make specialization feel more rewarding. D&D habits do not always translate. The group repeatedly drifted toward combat because that is how they are accustomed to solving encounters. Cyberpunk RED appears to reward planning, social interaction, contacts, infiltration, and avoiding unnecessary fights. There are a lot of rules to track. Skills, modifiers, range DVs, armor, conditions, cyberware, Netrunning, Humanity, and other subsystems create significant cognitive load, especially for a GM learning the game. Some skills feel overly specific. The huge skill list gives characters strong niches, but it can also make the system feel cluttered. Cyberware deserves a campaign, not a one-shot. Saving money, installing upgrades, changing your capabilities, and balancing improvements against Humanity looks like a major part of the long-term appeal. Humanity makes upgrades a meaningful choice. More chrome can make you more capable, but characters have limits, and traumatic experiences can create additional pressure. Downtime may be where Cyberpunk really shines. Rent, expenses, jobs, gear, cyberware, lifestyle choices, and trying to climb out of poverty reinforce the setting between missions. The game seems built for episodic campaigns. Take a job, prepare, execute it, survive the consequences, get paid, upgrade, pay your bills, and hope the next job goes better. A persistent roleplaying community could be fantastic. Contacts, rival crews, job offers, planning, and investigation could continue between sessions and make Night City feel alive. Community is one of the setting's strongest themes. When institutions cannot be trusted, your crew and the people you care about become your real support system. Cyberpunk is bleak without being completely nihilistic. The system may be rigged and the future may be awful, but relationships, loyalty, hope, and choosing what matters to you still have value. The Quickstart only showed part of the game. The group repeatedly stresses that they did not experience martial arts, car chases, much of the downtime system, long-term cyberware progression, or many other mechanics. Their opinion improved with familiarity. The second combat flowed better once everyone understood Netrunning and the basic mechanics, suggesting experience would smooth out some of the rough edges. The final verdict is complicated but positive. Cyberpunk RED has mechanics that frustrated them, but also enough depth, atmosphere, character specialization, campaign potential, and thematic weight that the group clearly sees why people love it. And perhaps the most Cyberpunk RED lesson of all: you can lose your money, your apartment, your Humanity, several expensive programs, and possibly your limbs, but at least your friends will be there to watch it happen. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

The good news is we found J-ZK. The bad news is her skull is open, Dave is fighting a man inside the internet, Marky has replaced diplomacy with a hand chainsaw, and everyone involved is eventually on fire. Welcome to the Cyberpunk RED finale, where friendship conquers evil, violence solves several problems, and our heroes save the girl, kill the villain, jump out of a twentieth-floor window while playing guitar, and discover the most important rule of Night City: heroic acts are not reimbursable. Show Notes Marky Day and Dave Costanzo face off against Mr. Frommiter, better known as Gangster 3D, in the finale of our Cyberpunk RED actual play. Marky handles things in meat space with his hand chainsaw while Dave battles Frommiter inside the Net Architecture. Both sides unleash Black ICE, people catch fire, programs get deleted, and Marky continues rolling numbers that make everyone suspicious of his dice. Dave finally chases Frommiter through the network and kills him by hacking his life-support systems. He then pushes deeper to disconnect J-ZK while Marky handles the important physical tasks, including putting out Dave's flaming head. With security closing in, Marky reveals that his escape plan has always involved parachutes. They smash a window, strap J-ZK to Marky, leave Hyperactive Hyena behind as a distraction, and BASE jump from the twentieth floor while Marky plays guitar. J-ZK is safe, Frommiter is dead, and Marky may finally have upgraded from backup romantic interest. Unfortunately, J-ZK missed her Sanru meeting, so nobody gets paid. Welcome to Night City. Key Takeaways Marky attacks Frommiter with a hand chainsaw while Dave fights him simultaneously in the Net. Black ICE turns the battle into a second combat happening inside the first one. Dave kills Frommiter by hacking his life-support systems. Dave successfully disconnects and rescues J-ZK. Hyperactive Hyena remains the team's extremely temporary murder-mascot ally. The crew escapes by parachuting from the twentieth floor while Marky plays guitar. J-ZK survives, but missing the Sanru presentation means the team earns nothing. Final accounting: save the client, kill the villain, lose money. Peak Cyberpunk. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Welcome to Bytopia, the Upper Plane for people who looked at Heaven and said, "This is nice, but could we make everyone work a little harder?" The weather is lovely, the neighbors are aggressively helpful, the economy is apparently powered by ethical commerce, and there's another entire world hanging upside down over your head. Also, there are adamantine dragons, because apparently even paradise needs something capable of turning your adventuring party into a fine red mist. Pack a lunch, bring your climbing gear, and try not to become so content that you forget you were supposed to leave. Show Notes This week on the RPGBOT.Podcast, we head to Bytopia, D&D's plane of good neighbors, hard work, beautiful weather, and deeply questionable planetary physics. Tyler, Randall, and Ash explore Bytopia's two facing layers, the people and creatures who live there, and what happens when an entire plane is infused with enough goodwill that visitors might simply decide everything is fine and never go home. We dig into travel between the layers, life and trade in Bytopia, intelligent plants, adamantine dragons, and the planar marketplace of Tradegate, where even the currency seems determined to make capitalism behave itself. Along the way, we consider the strange implications of an afterlife built around productive happiness and tackle the question of the week: if you built an "oops all" party using ancestries outside the Player's Handbook, what glorious collection of weirdos would you bring to the table? It's paradise. There's nice weather. Everyone is helpful. Naturally, we're suspicious. Key Takeaways Bytopia is good, but not lazy: The plane emphasizes community, cooperation, work, and the satisfaction that comes from building something worthwhile. The geography is wonderfully ridiculous: Its two layers face each other, creating one of the strangest landscapes in the D&D multiverse. Being happy can apparently be a planar hazard: Bytopia's pervasive goodwill and contentment could make visitors surprisingly reluctant to leave. Tradegate takes ethical commerce seriously: Its unusual currency and trading rules reinforce Bytopia's broader themes of fairness and cooperation. The wildlife gets weird: Intelligent plants and adamantine dragons help ensure that "pleasant Upper Plane" does not mean "nothing interesting happens here." Bytopia has strong adventure potential: Its unusual physics, settlements, trade, inhabitants, and planar travel offer considerably more than a peaceful celestial vacation. Oops All Weirdos remains a valid party-building strategy: The episode's non-PHB ancestry discussion proves that sometimes the best adventuring party looks like everyone ignored the character creation instructions. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Welcome back to Night City, where Tyler has acquired a another cat, Randall has acquired a bedazzled bulletproof vest, and Ash has apparently acquired the Cyberpunk equivalent of Five Nights at Freddy's. This week, Marky Day becomes Marky Knight and walks willingly into something everyone immediately identifies as a murder hallway. Dave gets set on fire by a computer, Marky discovers that cartoon mascots are weak against bullets, and together they spend every remaining resource to adopt a homicidal digital hyena. Somehow, all of this turns out to be the easy part, because at the end of the hallway is a cybernetic nightmare, their kidnapped employer, and a corporate executive offering them double their money to please stop asking questions. Welcome to Cyberpunk RED, chooms. Capitalism has a boss fight. Show Notes Marky Day and Dave Costanzo reach the twentieth floor of Discom and immediately discover that the cheerful corporate mascots are actually armed security drones. While Marky fights Buster Swine and Electric Bunny in meat space, Dave dives into the Net Architecture, battles a Hellhound, catches fire, and eventually hijacks Hyperactive Hyena to turn Discom's own security against itself. After stabilizing a seriously wounded Marky, Dave pushes deeper into the network and uncovers evidence that Discom has been targeting local 3D artists. J-ZK's name has been crossed off the list with the ominous note that she is no longer an issue. Behind the final door, they find J-ZK restrained and wired into machinery. Mr. Frommiter reveals that he is also Gangster 3D and admits that he kidnapped her after she refused to work for Discom. He offers Marky and Dave double their original payment to walk away. Marky chooses violence. Key Takeaways Marky battles Discom's armed mascot drones while Dave Netruns simultaneously. Dave survives a Hellhound attack, gets set on fire, and later loses his Sword program to an Asp. Marky is seriously wounded but stabilized with First Aid. Dave spends all his Luck to hijack Hyperactive Hyena and turn it against Discom. Discom has been pressuring and recruiting 3D artists across Night City. Mr. Frommiter and Gangster 3D are the same person. J-ZK has been kidnapped and forcibly connected to Discom's equipment. Frommiter offers the team double their pay to leave. The episode ends immediately before the boss fight. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Welcome to Night City, where housing is a shipping container, breakfast is kibble, and your most reliable neighbor is a rat named Greg. This week, Marky Day and Dave Costanzo accept a perfectly normal freelance job involving stalking, blackmail, corporate espionage, breaking and entering, and possibly assault. Fortunately, Marky has love in his heart, a mandolin in his bag, and the negotiating instincts to voluntarily reduce their payment by half. Dave, meanwhile, is an elite Netrunner capable of defeating corporate security, provided nobody asks him to walk quietly across a lobby without falling directly onto his face. Show Notes Marky Day and Dave Costanzo officially enter Night City for their first Cyberpunk RED adventure, but not before Tyler reveals that peer pressure convinced him to contact Brennan Lee Mulligan and possibly recover DiceGoblin.com. Having exhausted all responsible business decisions, the group finally turns to crime. Marky wakes in his increasingly hot storage container, works out, eats some kibble, and contemplates writing a song about how love could solve society's problems. He is a rockerboy, vigilante, and aggressively compassionate street philosopher who will never judge someone too harshly, though he may beat them up for their own personal growth. Next door, Dave Costanzo lives among cables, computer equipment, and spilled kibble. His breakfast is quickly claimed by Greg, the local rat and apparently the most dependable member of the team. Their morning changes when Marky receives a call from J-ZK, a colorful fashion designer and 3D weapons artist who helped support his music career. A rival artist calling himself Gangster 3D has been stalking her, threatening her, attempting to hack her agent, and using stolen private material to blackmail her. She believes he may also sabotage an important presentation to Sanroo. J-ZK asks Marky and Dave to break into the Discom corporate building, find Gangster 3D's operation, and steal the incriminating information from his computer. She initially offers them 5,000 eddies, but Marky decides that is far too generous and successfully negotiates their pay down to 2,500 each. Somewhere in Night City, a fixer feels a sudden disturbance in the economy. To get inside, Marky uses Charismatic Impact to locate one of his corporate fans at the Afterlife. John John may not work for Discom, but he works for Biotechnica and is willing to escort them to the building and vouch for them at security. Marky supports their cover story with a crumpled folder of sheet music masquerading as confidential briefing documents. Once inside, the pair begins searching for a network access point. Marky moves through the lobby like a seasoned professional. Dave rolls a critical failure on stealth, falls directly onto the floor, and explains to the nearby security guard that his shoe came untied. This works because security in Night City has apparently seen much worse before lunch. While Dave connects to the building's network, Marky provides cover by pretending to conduct an important corporate conversation. Dave bypasses a password, takes control of an employee-only door, and searches the network for information about Gangster 3D. He discovers the appointment calendar of Mr. Fromider, an executive on the twentieth floor. Fromider has met with Gangster 3D five times in the past two weeks and has also been meeting with several minor local artists. The pattern suggests that Gangster 3D may be involved in poaching artists like J-ZK for some larger corporate scheme. Marky and Dave slip into the private elevator, but Marky's incredible perception reveals a hidden sleep-gas system designed to incapacitate unauthorized passengers. Dave disables the device by cutting the correct wire, proving that he is significantly better at defeating electronic security than standing upright in public. The elevator still requires authorization, forcing Dave to jack into the network again. This time he must pass a Wisp Black ICE program to reach the elevator controls. He activates his Armor program, races past the hostile software, and successfully takes control of the elevator. The Wisp catches him before he can escape and attempts to damage his brain while reducing his available Net Actions. Dave's Armor absorbs the damage, allowing him to slide away from the pursuing program and safely jack out. The episode ends as the elevator begins climbing toward the twentieth floor. Marky and Dave are officially inside, Mr. Fromider is waiting somewhere above them, and the part of the mission where everything becomes violent has probably just begun. Key Takeaways The episode demonstrates how Cyberpunk RED combines social interaction, stealth, investigation, physical security, and Netrunning within the same mission. Marky's Charismatic Impact turns his fans into useful contacts. John John helps the team pass the building's first layer of security without violence. Marky and Dave complement each other well. Marky handles persuasion, distractions, and social situations, while Dave manages computers, access points, and electronic security. Critical successes and failures have immediate narrative effects. Marky repeatedly notices hidden dangers, while Dave's critical stealth failure nearly exposes the mission. Netrunners connect through physical access points and enter a layered Net Architecture containing passwords, files, control nodes, and Black ICE. Pathfinder allows a Netrunner to map parts of the architecture before moving deeper, reducing the risk of blindly encountering dangerous programs. Control nodes connect the digital and physical environments. Dave uses them to unlock an employee door and activate the private elevator. Disconnecting from a network resets most changes. A Netrunner must reach the bottom of the architecture and install a virus to create a lasting effect. Black ICE can attack a Netrunner directly, causing brain damage or interfering with their available Net Actions. Dave's Armor program completely absorbs the Wisp's damage, demonstrating the value of choosing and activating defensive programs before engaging hostile architecture. The team learns that Mr. Fromider has met repeatedly with Gangster 3D and several local artists, suggesting a broader scheme beyond J-ZK's personal blackmail problem. The adventure closes on a cliffhanger as Marky and Dave ascend toward the twentieth floor, having successfully completed the portion of the infiltration where nobody has shot them yet. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

The ranger's journey from level 5 to 20 is a majestic tale of growth, survival, and discovering that Hunter's Mark may not actually deserve permanent custody of your concentration. Randall's Gloom Stalker becomes an invisible crossbow machine, Ash's Drakewarden takes to the skies aboard a fire-breathing murder lizard, and Tyler spends sixteen levels converting every available feat, spell slot, and medical supply into increasingly desperate attempts to keep one flying snake alive. By level 20, two of these characters are legendary hunters. The third is still shouting, "Don't worry, buddy, I have Cure Wounds!" while filling out another pet insurance claim. Show Notes In this episode, we continue building our 2014 DnD 5e rangers, taking Randall's Gloom Stalker, Ash's Drakewarden, and Tyler's original Player's Handbook Beast Master from level 5 all the way to level 20. Extra Attack immediately improves everyone's combat potential, although Tyler is mostly excited because he can finally attack without ordering his flying snake to do it for him. From there, we examine the spells, feats, subclass features, and questionable design decisions that define the ranger's later levels. We also commit ranger heresy by asking whether Hunter's Mark is actually worth using. Magic Weapon offers better accuracy, reliable damage, an hour-long duration, and none of the constant bonus-action reassignment that interferes with Crossbow Expert, companion commands, and other important ranger abilities. As the builds gain more attacks and begin using Sharpshooter, improving the chance to hit becomes increasingly valuable, leaving Hunter's Mark standing in the wilderness wondering why nobody invited it to combat. The three subclasses develop very differently. Randall's Gloom Stalker continues doing Gloom Stalker things, including attacking repeatedly, disappearing into darkness, gaining Greater Invisibility, and generally becoming Batman with a crossbow. Ash's Drakewarden gains elemental damage, a flying companion, and a breath weapon that can turn a battlefield into an aerial geometry problem. Meanwhile, Tyler's Beast Master slowly crawls toward competence, eventually allowing his snake to attack twice and share spells, assuming it survives long enough to enjoy either feature. At the highest levels, the ranger's progression becomes much less exciting. Fifth-level spells offer a few useful options, Feral Senses arrives with awkward limitations, and the class gives players several excellent reasons to multiclass after level 15. The journey concludes with Foe Slayer, a capstone so underwhelming that the group proposes replacing it with a legendary death arrow capable of instantly killing enemies, because a level-20 ranger should receive something more exciting than occasionally adding Wisdom to one attack. Finally, the Question of the Week examines why players reacted differently to the DnD 2024 rules and the Pathfinder 2e Remaster. The discussion explores community expectations, the circumstances behind each revision, compatibility concerns, and the uncomfortable space occupied by an update that changes too much to feel like ordinary 5e but not enough to feel like a genuinely new edition. Key Takeaways Hunter's Mark is not mandatory. Rangers have several competing uses for concentration and bonus actions. Magic Weapon, Elemental Weapon, Guardian of Nature, and subclass abilities may provide more value depending on the build. Accuracy becomes increasingly important. Extra Attack, Crossbow Expert, Sharpshooter, and subclass features reward effects that improve the chance of landing multiple attacks rather than adding modest damage to only one target. The original Beast Master demands too much maintenance. Tyler considers healing feats, defensive buffs, and other resources simply to keep his low-CR companion alive, although the subclass eventually gains respectable features such as Bestial Fury and Share Spells. Gloom Stalker remains extremely powerful. Additional attacks, darkness-based invisibility, Stalker's Flurry, Greater Invisibility, and strong action economy allow the subclass to remain dangerous throughout the ranger's progression. Drakewarden delivers the strongest companion fantasy. Its drake gains mobility, elemental abilities, flight, and a flexible breath weapon without requiring the ranger to build an entire emergency medical system around it. Ranger spells are useful, but spell slots are scarce. Pass Without Trace, Spike Growth, Lightning Arrow, Elemental Weapon, Guardian of Nature, and other options can be excellent, but rangers need to make each limited spell slot count. The late-level class features are underwhelming. Feral Senses has frustrating restrictions, and Foe Slayer offers too little for a level-20 capstone, especially for rangers making numerous attacks every round. Subclass choice dramatically changes the ranger experience. One ranger becomes Batman, another gets an airborne dragon flamethrower, and the third spends sixteen levels inventing increasingly elaborate snake-based healthcare. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Character creation in Cyberpunk RED is simple. First, choose whether you want to be a violent criminal, a corporate criminal, or a musician who can accidentally start a cult. Then roll enough childhood trauma to explain why you live in a shipping container. This week, Randall creates Cyberpunk Mr. Rogers, a relentlessly loving rockerboy whose most treasured possession is a weapon, while Tyler creates a fashionable netrunner who values money, wants power, steals programs from people he brain-burns, and has somehow made a mortal enemy entirely through bad vibes. Meanwhile, Riverside attempts to achieve sentience by transforming Ash into a robot every time he says something useful. Show Notes In the second installment of our Cyberpunk RED Quickstart, Ash guides Randall and Tyler through character creation while Riverside fights desperately to prevent the information from reaching anyone. We begin with Cyberpunk RED's three character-creation methods. Streetrat gets a character onto the streets quickly with mostly predetermined options. Complete Package gives experienced players much more control over their statistics, skills, equipment, fashion, and cyberware. Between them is Edgerunner, which provides meaningful choices while keeping new players away from the most dangerous form of cyberpsychosis: analysis paralysis. Ash introduces the game's roles, including Solos, Netrunners, Techs, Medtechs, Medias, Execs, Lawmen, Fixers, Nomads, and Rockerboys. Randall briefly considers playing an Exec before discovering that a Rockerboy can become a cult leader through Charismatic Impact. At that point, the decision is effectively over. Tyler chooses a Netrunner, giving the team one character who gathers followers and another who steals people's files. The Lifepath system quickly demonstrates why Cyberpunk characters rarely arrive in Night City emotionally healthy. Randall develops a silly, free-spirited rockerboy who values friendship, believes every person matters, and loves everyone too much to name a single favorite person. He grew up around comfortable corporate technicians before living aboard a traveling ship, where musicians taught him to perform. Then the ship sank. His family and mentor died, but Randall's character survived by floating to safety on his mentor's acoustic guitar. After living freely on an island, he was eventually rescued and returned to a society he no longer believes anyone needs. His new mission is to escape life on the street and bring everyone else with him. He is essentially Cyberpunk Mr. Rogers, assuming Mr. Rogers had piercings, cyberware, and a guitar that kills fascists. Tyler's Netrunner develops in the opposite direction. He is sneaky, deceptive, fashionable, motivated by money, and interested in gaining power and control. He grew up in a nomad pack among ruined settlements before his family lost everything through betrayal. He works alone from a workspace full of gamer debris, accepts jobs from media figures and political or law-enforcement contacts, and has local gangers protecting his territory. He also steals programs from Netrunners after brain-burning them, which raises several questions about why anyone continues giving Tyler characters unrestricted access to technology. Both characters somehow roll three friends, multiple enemies, and enough tragic relationships to support several seasons of prestige television. One shared rival may merely insult Randall's rockerboy but wants to murder Tyler's Netrunner on sight, apparently because Tyler's personality failed a vibe check so badly that it became a capital offense. The episode finishes with statistics, derived attributes, skills, weapons, armor, fashion, housing, and cyberware. Randall's Rockerboy receives an audio recorder, chemskin, a cyberaudio suite, and tech hair. Both characters begin life in cargo containers, because even in the dark future, affordable housing remains the most unrealistic part of science fiction. Finally, Randall names his new rockerboy Marky Day, short for Marquette Lafayette. The stage is set for Marky and Tyler's deeply suspicious Netrunner to enter Night City, find work, make enemies, and enjoy the approximate life expectancy of a mayfly standing beneath an Arasaka boot. Key Takeaways Cyberpunk RED offers three approaches to character creation: the fast Streetrat method, the guided Edgerunner method, and the highly customizable Complete Package. Edgerunner is presented as the strongest option for new players because it offers choices while keeping characters functional in their selected roles. Roles define much more than combat abilities. They determine how characters influence the setting, find work, form connections, and solve problems. Execs can be challenging for inexperienced players because their corporate loyalties may clash with the anti-establishment motivations of other characters. Rockerboys use Charismatic Impact to influence fans and larger groups. They do not need to be musicians and can instead be poets, artists, dancers, political speakers, or cult leaders. The Lifepath system is the heart of character creation. Random results establish personality, cultural background, clothing, relationships, family history, enemies, romances, goals, and role-specific connections. Players are not always required to accept a random result literally. The group frequently interprets, expands, combines, or rerolls results to create a more coherent character. Randall's Rockerboy becomes a hopeful, compassionate performer whose optimism is supported by a profoundly tragic history. Tyler's Netrunner becomes an ambitious and morally questionable hacker with criminal contacts, a messy workspace, stolen programs, and multiple people who want him dead. Fashion has social importance. Clothing affects how characters are perceived by corporate employees, street contacts, potential clients, and criminals. Characters must balance equipment and cyberware against their available money and Humanity. More cyberware provides useful abilities but gradually reduces the character's Humanity and Empathy. Starting characters begin at rank four in their primary role ability. Lower ranks exist partly to support acquiring abilities from additional roles later. Both characters begin in cargo-container housing, establishing their place near the bottom of Night City's economic food chain. Character creation succeeds because the mechanics generate story hooks rather than merely numbers. Before the game begins, the characters already have friends, enemies, trauma, ambitions, rivalries, and several excellent reasons for everything to go terribly wrong.

Tonight, we're talking vampires, history's greatest transformation from suspiciously bloated corpse to immortal bisexual aristocrat with a castle, a cape, and absolutely no respect for personal boundaries. We dig into garlic, holy symbols, counting mustard seeds, bricks shoved into mouths, and the alarming number of vampire prevention methods involving someone's severed head near their butt. Then we compare D&D's growing collection of bitey hit-point bags with Pathfinder's bold decision to let you turn almost anything into a vampire. Grab a wooden stake, protect your neck, and remember: the undead pyramid scheme is not a scam if every wight gets eight zombies beneath them. Show Notes Vampires have been haunting folklore for centuries, but before they became wealthy, seductive goth icons, they were mostly blamed on misunderstood decomposition, disease, and humanity's long tradition of confidently inventing explanations for things it did not understand. We explore the regional beliefs surrounding vampires, including animal transformations, compulsive counting, invitations, running water, graveyard horse tests, and the creative methods people used to keep corpses from returning. Apparently, garlic was not enough. Sometimes you needed decapitation, holy water, a brick, and a very specific head-placement strategy. From there, we follow the vampire from folklore through The Vampyre and Dracula, then directly into tabletop gaming. Strahd is examined as D&D's legally distinct Dracula, complete with an Eastern European castle, disposable vampire brides, an unpleasant servant, and an unhealthy obsession with one particular woman. We discuss why vampires make such effective villains, whether they should always be irredeemably evil, and how their intelligence, charisma, resources, and ability to escape make them more interesting than another monster waiting patiently to be reduced to zero hit points. Tyler walks through D&D's increasingly crowded vampire bestiary, including vampire spawn, familiars, mind flayers, Nosferatu, infernalists, wardens, spellcasters, warriors, umbral lords, hopping vampires, and several versions of Strahd. Ash discovers that many updated vampires lost their regeneration and responds with the measured restraint everyone has come to expect. We also uncover the Jiangshi's undead pyramid scheme, where drained victims become wights, wights create zombies, and everyone receives an exciting opportunity to become their own boss. Pathfinder 2e takes a more flexible approach with vampire adjustments that can be applied to nearly any living creature. Want a vampire dwarf, vampire monster, full vampire character, Dhampir, or suspiciously blood-focused animal companion? Pathfinder has paperwork for that. We compare its vampire families, weaknesses, regeneration, player archetypes, unusual feeding options, and the many ways players can embrace eternal life without being reduced to a single edgy species choice. Finally, the Question of the Week asks how to deliver a satisfying campaign ending. The hosts discuss final boss battles, player-driven epilogues, heroic sacrifices, closing character arcs, carrying consequences into future campaigns, and giving everyone enough closure to explain what their character does after saving the world. Tyler also recommends a total party kill, because rocks falling remains the most efficient form of narrative finality. Key Takeaways Vampire folklore varied dramatically between regions, but blood drinking, animal transformations, compulsions, returning corpses, and elaborate burial precautions appeared frequently. Many historical vampire scares were fueled by misunderstandings about decomposition, disease, bloating, and blood appearing around a corpse's mouth. Bram Stoker's Dracula established many of the traits associated with modern vampires, including wealth, sophistication, seduction, immortality, and aristocratic menace. Strahd is essentially D&D's version of Dracula, enhanced with wizard abilities, legendary actions, extensive resources, and enough emotional baggage to fill Castle Ravenloft. Vampires make strong recurring villains because they are intelligent, charismatic, difficult to permanently destroy, and capable of retreating to fight another day. D&D offers numerous vampire variants, but several newer designs reduce them to durable biting monsters, and the removal of regeneration makes them feel less distinct. The Jiangshi can create an expanding hierarchy of wights and zombies, producing what can only be described as an undead pyramid scheme. Pathfinder 2e's vampire adjustments allow GMs to apply vampire abilities to existing creatures instead of relying entirely on separate stat blocks. Pathfinder also provides more vampire-related player options, including the Dhampir heritage, vampire archetype, vampiric companions, and blood-draining spells. A satisfying campaign ending should extend beyond defeating the final boss and give players room to resolve relationships, describe their futures, and address the consequences of their choices. Asking characters what they hope to do after the adventure can help the GM build meaningful rewards and bring long-running stories full circle. Heroic sacrifice can create a powerful bittersweet ending when the choice belongs to the player rather than being forced upon them. Plot holes may be forgotten, but players remember when an old joke, promise, relationship, or seemingly insignificant choice returns during the finale. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Welcome to Ranger levels 1 through 4, where you can become a deadly shadow archer, command your own miniature dragon, or sacrifice your entire action so that a flying snake with the structural integrity of wet parchment can participate in combat. In this episode, we explore Favored Enemies nobody tracks, terrain nobody visits, spells competing for the same concentration slot, and the revolutionary discovery that the Ranger becomes significantly better when you replace most of the Ranger. Grab your longbow, release your drake, and prepare to whisper, "Go get 'em, little buddy," moments before your animal companion is killed by incidental damage. Show Notes The Ranger has spent years carrying a terrible reputation, but is the entire class actually bad, or did everyone read the original Beast Master, experience psychic damage, and refuse to look at the class again? In this episode, we begin our journey through the 2014 Ranger from levels 1 through 4. We break down the class's ability scores, armor, weapons, skills, Fighting Styles, spellcasting, and its awkward position somewhere between Fighter, Rogue, and person who remembers to bring enough trail rations. We examine the original Favored Enemy and Natural Explorer features, which are extremely useful when the campaign takes place in one specific biome against one specific enemy and the DM insists that every mile of travel be handled in real time. Then we look at Tasha's optional features, including Favored Foe and Deft Explorer, which give Rangers abilities they might actually use during an adventure. At level 3, the builds split dramatically. Randall embraces the darkness with a Gloom Stalker built around stealth, hand crossbows, and making an alarming number of attacks before the enemy understands that combat has started. Ash chooses the Drakewarden, gaining a durable dragon companion that can attack, support allies, and generally behave like a functional subclass feature. Tyler, meanwhile, voluntarily builds the original Player's Handbook Beast Master. Armed with determination, optimism, and a flying snake that can be eliminated by an aggressively closed door, he attempts to prove that the subclass can work. It technically can, provided your definition of working includes surrendering your action, protecting your pet at all costs, and carrying its body around until the DM allows you to find another one. By level 4, the difference is impossible to ignore. The Gloom Stalker is attacking repeatedly from the shadows, the Drakewarden is firing arrows while a dragon controls the front line, and the Beast Master is pointing toward the enemy and asking his snake to please do something useful. Two Rangers are ready for the next tier of play. One Ranger needs to lie down. Key Takeaways Dexterity is usually the Ranger's best primary ability. It supports ranged and finesse weapons, Armor Class, initiative, Stealth, and several important saving throws without demanding the impossible ability spread required by most Strength builds. The original level-one features are painfully campaign-dependent. Favored Enemy mostly helps with tracking and recalling information, while Natural Explorer becomes relevant only when the party is traveling through the terrain you selected. Tasha's optional features are major improvements. Favored Foe provides extra damage without consuming a bonus action, while Deft Explorer gives the Ranger expertise in a chosen skill and helps it better occupy the party's scout role. Bonus-action management matters. Hunter's Mark, two-weapon fighting, Crossbow Expert, and companion commands can all compete for the same bonus action, so your build needs a clear plan for how its turns will work. Archery remains an excellent Fighting Style. The attack bonus is reliable, useful at every level, and especially valuable for builds planning to use powerful ranged feats later. Ranger spells should provide more than damage. Healing, control, mobility, and utility can offer better value than repeatedly concentrating on Hunter's Mark, especially when Favored Foe can handle shorter fights. Most Ranger subclasses are functional or strong. Gloom Stalker offers excellent opening-round offense, Drakewarden delivers an effective companion, and even Hunter remains playable. The original Beast Master is the feature responsible for much of the class's terrible reputation. The original Beast Master has a brutal action economy. Commanding the companion to attack consumes the Ranger's action, leaving the character watching their pet play D&D on their behalf. Modern companion subclasses demonstrate what Beast Master should have been. The Drake can act through a bonus action, contribute extra damage with its reaction, support the front line, and survive encounters without requiring constant emotional and medical supervision. Your build should have a recognizable combat loop by level 4. Randall attacks rapidly from hiding, Ash fires from range while the Drake fights up front, and Tyler commands a snake while quietly reconsidering every decision that brought him here. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Wizards of the Coast has revealed its plans for the future of Dungeons & Dragons, and apparently the strategy is simple: fix D&D Beyond, return to Gen Con, outsource adventures to people who know what they are doing, cross over with World of Warcraft, and traumatize a convention hall full of children with a Dark Sun trailer featuring a freshly removed spine. Tyler attended the secret briefing and emerged with five pages of notes, several enormous announcements, and absolutely no idea what D&D Icons are. So prepare yourselves for new books, old settings, digital upgrades, live puppies, and enough upcoming content to make your wallet roll a death save. EnWorld: President of WotC Steps Down Forbidden Lands (affiliate link) Show Notes Wizards of the Coast has revealed its roadmap for Dungeons & Dragons through 2027, and Tyler is here to unload everything he learned during an embargoed presentation. We begin at Gen Con, which Wizards plans to turn into the recurring home for its annual D&D announcements. There will be a massive convention presence, live events, streams, adoptable puppies, and something called D&D Icons. Everyone involved seems extremely excited about Icons. Unfortunately, nobody appears capable of explaining what they actually are. D&D Beyond is also getting a substantial overhaul. Wizards plans to introduce tools for finding groups, allow local game stores to advertise events, and form an official partnership with StartPlaying. The mobile app is being redesigned, the character builder and rules engine are being rebuilt, and new DM tools, improved search, and campaign-creation features are somewhere on the horizon. Several details remain vague, partly because the presentation's prerecorded D&D Beyond video stopped working halfway through. Technology! On the video game side, Wizards appears to be pulling back from its plan to release a major game every year. Several projects have reportedly been canceled, but Warlock and Exodus remain in development. Warlock will feature a protagonist whose patron is Tasha, while Exodus is shaping up as a science-fiction RPG with strong Mass Effect energy and a tabletop tie-in that nobody on the podcast entirely understands. The tabletop schedule begins with Arcana Unleashed, a large rules expansion containing eight subclasses, ten backgrounds, twenty-nine feats, thirty-three spells, group patrons, magical factions, forty-seven magic items, and nineteen creature stat blocks. It will also introduce evolving magic items that can grow alongside the characters using them. Its companion campaign, Deadfall, is an espionage-focused adventure running from levels 11 through 20. The characters must save Thay by opposing Szass Tam, which means the situation has become so dire that saving Thay somehow qualifies as the good outcome. The Season of Champions brings a full Dungeons & Dragons crossover with World of Warcraft. The book is being led by longtime D&D designer and Warcraft fan James Wyatt and will include eleven species, six subclasses, iconic locations, recognizable characters, dungeons, monsters designed to provide a raid-like experience, a DM screen, and a map pack with a digital adventure. It will also come in three different editions, allowing Horde and Alliance fans to continue fighting the most important battle of all: which logo belongs on the front of the book. Then comes Dark Sun. Wizards is presenting Athas as the first mature D&D setting, complete with shrink-wrapped books, content warnings, extreme violence, and a trailer that apparently wastes no time separating people from their spinal columns. Dark Sun will receive separate setting and gameplay expansions, a limited-edition Player's Handbook, a new Scion class, a DM screen, maps, and some form of adventure support. The gameplay material alone is expected to approach five hundred pages, suggesting that Wizards is not returning to Athas quietly. Greyhawk will also return during the 2027 Season of Sword and Sorcery. Crown of the Witch Queen is a 160-page adventure featuring Tasha's daughter as its central antagonist, supported by a map pack and DM screen. The final 2027 season, the Season of Rebellion, was announced without details, leaving everyone to speculate angrily until Wizards decides to explain itself. Perhaps the largest long-term change is Wizards' plan for annual setting support produced in partnership with established third-party publishers. Ghostfire Gaming will work on Ravenloft, Visionary Products and Designs will handle Eberron, and Kobold Press will support the Forgotten Realms. Wizards is also developing something with the Hickmans, although details remain scarce. The approach could finally give neglected settings regular adventures and character options, but it also raises questions about outsourcing, quality control, digital-only releases, and whether D&D is about to recreate the overwhelming flood of material from the third-edition era. Despite those concerns, the group is cautiously optimistic. Wizards seems willing to experiment, work with proven creators, support more settings, focus on tabletop products, and admit that maybe trying to become a video game company was not the best use of everyone's time. It could produce an exciting new era for D&D, or it could become an exhausting avalanche of crossovers and subscription content. Either way, Ash will be waiting for the D&D and Family Guy campaign setting so they can finally say they warned us. Key Takeaways Gen Con is becoming D&D's annual announcement hub. Wizards intends to reveal future product roadmaps there instead of relying on scattered online presentations. D&D Beyond is being extensively rebuilt. Planned improvements include group-finding tools, local game-store listings, StartPlaying integration, a redesigned app, a new character builder, a new rules engine, better search, DM tools, and campaign creation. Arcana Unleashed is a major player-focused expansion. It includes subclasses, feats, spells, backgrounds, factions, patrons, dozens of magic items, and new rules for items that evolve with their owners. Deadfall finally supports high-level campaigning. The adventure runs from levels 11 through 20 and sends the party into an espionage conflict against Szass Tam in Thay. The World of Warcraft crossover is a full product line. It includes numerous playable species, subclasses, famous locations, raid-inspired encounters, accessories, digital content, and three different cover editions. Dark Sun is returning without being noticeably softened. Wizards is positioning it as a mature setting with separate lore and gameplay books, graphic content warnings, hundreds of pages of material, and promised adventure support. Greyhawk returns with Crown of the Witch Queen. The adventure will feature Tasha's daughter as the antagonist and lean into a colorful, operatic sword-and-sorcery style. Classic settings may receive annual support. Wizards is partnering with experienced publishers to produce new Ravenloft, Eberron, and Forgotten Realms material, with another Hickman-related project also in development. Third-party partnerships could solve D&D's setting problem. Instead of leaving worlds unsupported for years, specialized publishers can create material while Wizards focuses on core rules and major releases. The biggest risk is content overload. More books, digital releases, partnerships, settings, and crossovers could strengthen the game, but they could also recreate the crowded and difficult-to-navigate release schedule of earlier editions. The overall mood is cautiously optimistic. The announcements suggest that Wizards is taking creative risks, investing in tabletop content, and making decisions that could benefit both players and the wider TTRPG industry. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Welcome to Night City, chooms, where the sky is red, the rent is due, your landlord is probably armed, and health care arrives by helicopter only if your credit score has a body count. In this episode, Ash introduces Randall and Tyler to Cyberpunk Red, a game about surviving late-stage capitalism after it bought a katana, installed cyberlegs, and decided empathy was bad for quarterly growth. The internet is dead, the new internet is haunted, corporations have private armies, your apartment is a cargo container, and if you get shot badly enough, your best hope is that Trauma Team thinks your subscription tier is worth the bullets. So chrome up, talk before you glock, and remember: in Cyberpunk, the future is not here to save you. It is here to invoice you. Cyberpunk: RED Core Rulebook (affiliate link) Show Notes This RPGBOT.Podcast Quickstart kicks off our Cyberpunk Red arc, with Ash taking the GM chair and immediately shoving Randall and Tyler into a glittering corporate hellscape where every system has failed except capitalism, which unfortunately got promoted. This is the concepts and themes episode, so before anyone gets to build a tragic little neon goblin with a gun, Ash walks us through the setting, the history, the tone, and the important survival lesson that being cool does not make you bulletproof. The episode starts in peak RPGBOT fashion: no one is ready, Producer Dan scares the cast, Evil RPGBOT becomes a conspiracy board, and the crew somehow detours through Taylor Swift, soccer, the metric system, and America's inability to understand that a third of a pound is bigger than a quarter. Eventually, because someone has to be the adult and it sure is not going to be capitalism, Ash drags everyone into Cyberpunk Red. Cyberpunk Red takes place in 2045, during the Time of Red, after the Fourth Corporate War and the pocket-nuke-sized corporate tantrum that helped turn Night City into a smoldering lesson in why companies should not have militaries. The old Net is gone, rogue AIs lurk behind the Black Wall, and the new Net is a bunch of local data structures that Netrunners have to physically approach because apparently even hacking needed to become a contact sport. Mechanically, the game runs on D10 checks and D6 damage, which sounds friendly right up until someone explains combat. Fights are fast, violent, and deeply uninterested in your character arc. Armor helps until it gets chewed apart. Critical injuries can cost you limbs, senses, or dignity. Death saves are less a dramatic countdown and more a paperwork-light way of saying congratulations, you lived long enough to regret this. Ash also digs into Netrunning, Black ICE, cyberware, humanity loss, and cyberpsychosis. Netrunners are basically hackers with a death wish and a brain cable. Black ICE is corporate malware that wants to delete either your programs or your thoughts. Cyberware lets you replace your sad meat parts with upgrades, but too much chrome can eat away at your humanity until you become less person and more violent product recall. By the end, Cyberpunk Red comes across as stylish, brutal, roleplay-heavy, and aggressively allergic to the idea that anyone is having a good time for free. It is a game about survival, reputation, scarcity, and looking incredible while the world collapses around you. Next up: character creation, where Tyler will almost certainly try to become some kind of cyber-wizard trash gremlin and everyone will pretend to be surprised. Key Takeaways Cyberpunk Red is set in 2045 during the Time of Red, which is what happens when the future catches fire and nobody with money feels personally inconvenienced enough to fix it. The setting is corporate dystopia with the safety rails removed. Governments are weak, corporations are terrifying, and basic human needs have been turned into subscription models with worse customer service. The old Net is dead because a vengeful hacker released digital nightmares into the system. Now the Black Wall keeps the murder-AIs in the internet basement, where they are definitely fine and nothing bad will ever happen. The new Net is localized, which means Netrunners have to get physically close to access points. Hacking is no longer safely done from your couch. Now it comes with floor plans and gunfire. The core system is simple: roll a D10, add your stat and skill, and try to beat the difficulty. The consequences, however, are very committed to ruining your evening. Combat is deadly, fast, and rude. Armor degrades, bullets hurt, and the game strongly encourages the sacred cyberpunk tradition of not starting a gunfight unless you are ready to become street decor. Critical injuries are nasty. Cyberpunk Red does not ask whether you are emotionally attached to your arm before it starts making suggestions. Trauma Team can save you, but only if you can afford the good plan. In Night City, even emergency rescue has premium tiers, because of course it does. Netrunners are terrifying little brain-goblins who can hack systems, fight programs, and potentially ruin someone's cyberware from the inside. They are cool, useful, and absolutely one bad roll away from becoming soup. Cyberware is powerful and stylish, but it has a humanity cost. Replace too much of yourself and the game starts asking whether you are still a person or just a problem with optics. Cyberpsychosis is not just a punishment for wanting cool robot arms. The episode points out that the game treats medical prosthetics and elective combat chrome differently, which gives the system more nuance than just metal parts make you evil. Cyberpunk Red is roleplay-forward. Rent, lifestyle, jobs, reputation, hustle, and survival all matter. You are not just adventuring. You are trying to make it to next month without being evicted, harvested, hacked, shot, or monetized. The next episode moves into character creation using the Edgerunner method, because apparently everyone agreed that dying in Night City should at least be efficient. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati  

Welcome to Pandemonium, the plane where the wind screams, gravity is a rumor, and every emergency exit has a reasonable chance of dropping you directly into the Abyss. Tyler explains the cosmology, Randall attempts to locate something resembling a usable map, Ash discovers that the wind is made from every scream anyone has ever screamed, and Producer Dan quietly realizes this entire episode will require aggressive noise reduction. Pack darkvision, ear protection, and a backup character. The weather is hostile, the architecture hates you, and even the demons would rather be somewhere else. Show Notes This week on the RPGBOT.Podcast, we descend into Pandemonium, the endlessly dark maze of caves where hurricane-force winds carry ancient voices, communication is nearly impossible, and prolonged exposure can leave travelers deaf, insane, or both. The crew explores the plane's four layers, from the enormous caverns of Pandesmos to the narrowing tunnels of Cocytus, the marginally more gravity-compliant Phlegethon, and the sealed chambers of Agathion, where forgotten horrors wait patiently for some adventurer with a shovel and poor judgment. Along the way, we examine Pandemonium's strange inhabitants, exiled gods, nihilistic settlements, bizarre monsters, and oddly specific afterlives. We also follow the River Styx, investigate portals that treat destinations as optional suggestions, and discover a magical shouting spot that lets you insult someone anywhere in the multiverse, provided invisible shadow demons do not eat you first. Finally, the episode turns to using spells against player characters. The hosts discuss why illusion magic becomes terrifying in the hands of a villain, how Pass Without Trace can transform ordinary goblins into a tactical nightmare, and why Dungeon Masters should give enemy spellcasters clever strategies without simply making the players miserable. RPGBOT.Podcast Episodes The Abyss Arborea Archeron Arcadia The Beastlands Bytopia Carceri Celestia Elysium The Ethereal Plane The Feywild Gehenna Hades Hell Part 1 Hell Part 2 Limbo Mechanus Pandemonium Plane of Air Plane of Fire Shadowfell Key Takeaways Pandemonium is an environmental threat before combat even begins. Darkness, deafening winds, madness, and unpredictable gravity can challenge a party without requiring constant monster encounters. The plane contains four layers: Pandesmos, Cocytus, Phlegethon, and Agathion. Each becomes more difficult to navigate, survive, or pronounce. The wind does more than make noise. It carries voices, screams, threats, and other sounds from across history, creating an endless supernatural chorus capable of destroying a traveler's sanity. Navigation is nearly impossible when characters can walk along cave walls and ceilings and rivers can flow in whatever direction they feel like flowing. Most of Pandemonium's inhabitants are exiles, prisoners, refugees, or creatures that arrived accidentally and cannot leave. Nobody appears to have moved there because of the excellent schools. Agathion's sealed pockets make excellent prisons, vaults, and adventure locations for ancient beings that absolutely should not be awakened. The River Styx and Pandemonium's portals provide possible escape routes, but memory loss, random destinations, and ambush predators make every option terrible in a different way. Pandemonium works best when the plane itself feels like the primary antagonist. The monsters should be additional complications, not the only source of danger. Enemy illusionists can create memorable encounters, but Dungeon Masters should apply the same standards to NPC illusions that they apply to player illusions. Smart enemies using stealth, terrain, traps, and spells such as Pass Without Trace can turn supposedly weak creatures into serious threats without artificially increasing their statistics. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Tonight, the RPGBOT.Podcast enters the discourse arena, where Paizo is financially bleeding, Archives of Nethys accidentally brought a flamethrower to a contract negotiation, and the internet has already decided who the villain is without reading past the headline. Ash arrives with enough hot takes to melt adamantine, Tyler desperately attempts to preserve nuance, and Randall keeps feeding increasingly tortured metaphors into the Wayback Machine. Grab your popcorn, silence your notifications, and remember: the rules are still free. Everyone can please stop screaming now. UPDATE: Joint announcement from Paizo+AoN on Juy 24th Links Impossible Magic on paizo.com Amazon: Impossible Magic (affiliate link) Paizo Announces Layoffs June 8th Reddit thread with links to support affected people Archives of Nethys announcement July 14th Paizo blog post about Archives of Nethys July 15th AoN FAQ July 17th UPDATE: Joint announcement from Paizo+AoN on Juy 24th More Info Ronald the Rules Lawyer on the Paizo layoffs Show Notes Paizo has ended its eight-year official licensing partnership with Archives of Nethys, and the Pathfinder community reacted with all the restraint and careful consideration of a barbarian discovering Reddit. We break down what is actually changing, what is not changing, and why Archives of Nethys is not being deleted, destroyed, paywalled, or dragged behind Paizo headquarters. The site can still provide Pathfinder and Starfinder rules for free, but it will lose access to most official artwork and will no longer receive books early enough to guarantee new content on release day. To understand why Paizo would make such an unpopular decision, we climb into the Wayback Machine and revisit the Diamond Comic Distributors bankruptcy, millions of dollars in inaccessible Paizo inventory, costly legal disputes, tariffs, financial losses, and the recent layoffs affecting roughly 15 percent of Paizo's staff. Paizo says the Archives of Nethys license required legal, financial, and administrative resources that the company can no longer justify, especially when the expected royalty payments never materialized. We also examine how both sides handled the announcement. Paizo communicated poorly, chose terrible timing, and apparently believed email was the ideal tool for navigating a beloved eight-year partnership during a financial crisis. Archives of Nethys responded emotionally, published its announcement without giving Paizo advance notice, omitted important context about ongoing negotiations and a six-month transition period, and then buried much of the clarification inside a video and forum comments. The result was a community firestorm in which everyone was angry, nobody had the complete story, and Diamond somehow remained the least surprising villain. Ultimately, this is not Paizo attempting a Wizards-style crackdown on free rules access. It is a struggling company cutting expenses while two groups of exhausted people make imperfect decisions under enormous stress. Support Archives of Nethys through Patreon or by disabling your ad blocker, purchase Pathfinder products directly from Paizo when possible, and perhaps give everyone enough time to get on a video call before declaring the death of the entire hobby. Key Takeaways Archives of Nethys is not shutting down. Its existing Pathfinder and Starfinder rules content will remain freely accessible. The major changes are the loss of most official Paizo artwork and the end of early PDF access, meaning new rules may no longer appear on release day. Paizo's decision comes amid severe financial pressure caused by the Diamond bankruptcy, inaccessible inventory, legal expenses, tariffs, losses, and staff layoffs. The license produced no royalties because Archives of Nethys operates through donations, advertising, and unpaid volunteer labor rather than as a profit-making business. Paizo says the relationship still required legal, licensing, financial, and administrative work, including policing unauthorized reuse of artwork taken from the site. Archives of Nethys presented an incomplete version of the situation in its original announcement, including leaving out ongoing negotiations and the six-month grace period for removing restricted artwork. Paizo also deserves criticism for poor communication, bad timing, and allowing an important partnership discussion to stall through email. The backlash was intensified by fear and incomplete information, not by evidence that Paizo intends to eliminate free access to its rules. Both organizations say they remain open to finding another arrangement, and the hosts believe a compromise may still be possible. Fans can support both sides by contributing to Archives of Nethys, disabling ad blockers on the site, and buying products directly from Paizo rather than through Amazon. Tyler proposes that Paizo create an affiliate program so Pathfinder creators can direct customers to Paizo's store while earning revenue and helping more money reach the publisher. The true villain remains Diamond, with capitalism receiving a strong honorable mention. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

We return to Wizards of the Coast's Villainous Options, now revised after the first round was lovingly pushed down the stairs by public feedback. Some subclasses survived untouched. Some got a makeover. Some were taken behind the shed, especially the Primordial Patron, which had one great idea and the mechanical confidence of a wet napkin. Good news, though: the demon sorcerer finally feels demonic, the Titan Druid is now a proper kaiju tank, and the Hell Knight has upgraded from flaming disappointment to legally playable infernal gambling problem. Show Notes This episode revisits Wizards of the Coast's latest Unearthed Arcana update for Villainous Options, which means the crew returns to the scene of the crime to see what survived the feedback cycle, what got rewritten, and what was quietly removed from the suspect board. The earlier Villainous Options episodes gave us some strong concepts with mixed execution: villainous path feats like the Death Knight and Lich, subclasses like the Titan Druid and Hell Knight, and later options like the Path of Lament Barbarian, Pestilence Cleric, Venom Monk, and the now-defenestrated Primordial Patron Warlock. Some of those were apparently well-liked enough to move forward with little public revision. Others came back covered in red ink and shame. The episode opens by sorting out what is not in the new UA. Path of Lament, Pestilence Cleric, and Venom Monk appear to have landed well enough that they did not need another public pass, though the hosts still have a few lingering concerns about capstones, wording, and whether weaponized sadness is legally distinct from being a barbarian with theater kid energy. The Death Knight and Lich villain paths also seem likely to continue, though Ash remains skeptical that the Lich is as ready as WotC apparently thinks it is. The Primordial Patron, meanwhile, is gone for now, which hurts because the concept rules, but the subclass itself never really delivered on the fantasy of making a pact with an ancient elemental apocalypse. Then the real revisions begin with Circle of the Titan Druid, which gets a much-needed identity check. The old version wanted to be a giant monster but had all the durability of a parade float in a hailstorm. The new version leans harder into tanking: better AC, more temporary hit points, stronger damage scaling, a shorter but more practical Titan form duration, and a capstone swallow ability that finally feels like being eaten by a kaiju instead of being mildly inconvenienced by one. Behemoth and Insectoid both look more playable, with Insectoid getting a strong healing identity, while Leviathan still mostly answers the question, "What if your subclass feature was swimming?" Hell Knight also gets a major facelift, mostly by reducing its dependence on rolling exactly the right number before anything interesting happens. The infernal wounds now feel more like a real subclass engine, with rider effects that happen more consistently and Devil's Luck upgrades when the dice cooperate. It is much better than before, but the table still finds it a little too constrained by resources and a little too enamored with gambling mechanics. It is no longer borderline unplayable, which is progress, but it may still need another pass before it becomes the infernal fighter fantasy everyone clearly wants. The big winner is Demonic Sorcery. The previous version felt like a melee sorcerer with terrible life choices, a bad spell list, and an aura table that made everyone remember why random subclass tables are rarely fun. The revision gives it Abyssal Rupture, a movable sphere of demonic problems that pulls enemies around, creates battlefield control, scales into difficult terrain, and eventually supports summon fiend in a way that finally screams Abyss instead of discount Hexblade with a concussion. The spell list is also dramatically better, replacing nonsense like Hallow and overused Misty Step with options that fit the theme and support the playstyle. It still needs damage scaling on the rupture, but this is the rare UA glow-up where the hosts go from roasting the thing to wanting to play it. The episode also touches on the new feats and epic boons, which range from charming people by picking their pockets to setting better hunting traps to becoming weirdly hard to fool, possess, or kill with necrotic damage. The hosts speculate about what book this material is actually building toward, with possibilities ranging from a renamed Book of Vile Darkness to an evil campaign supplement, a fiendish planar guide, or something tied to the Abyss and Nine Hells. Whatever it becomes, the consensus is cautiously positive: WotC seems to be listening, the revisions are mostly moving in the right direction, and the demon sorcerer finally has enough flavor to stop apologizing for itself. Key Takeaways This UA is a feedback-driven revision of the previous Villainous Options material, not a totally new batch of evil toys. Path of Lament Barbarian, Pestilence Cleric, and Venom Monk appear to have been received well enough that they did not return for major public revision. The Death Knight and Lich villain paths seem likely to continue, though the hosts still think Lich needs more work and Death Knight may get broadened for more martial builds. The Primordial Patron Warlock is gone for now, which is sad because the idea is excellent, but the original execution did not feel like a pact with an elemental world-ending horror. Circle of the Titan Druid is much stronger now and has a clearer role as the tanky kaiju druid. Titan Druid's improved AC, temporary hit points, damage scaling, and better swallow feature make the subclass feel much closer to its fantasy. Behemoth looks solid, Insectoid now has a meaningful healer/tank angle, and Leviathan still feels like the one you pick because the campaign has too much water. Hell Knight is much better because infernal wounds now do interesting things more consistently instead of asking players to roll a six before the subclass becomes fun. Hell Knight still feels too resource-limited and may need another pass, especially if the goal is to make infernal wounds feel like the subclass's real engine. Demonic Sorcery is the standout winner of the revision. The new Abyssal Rupture gives Demonic Sorcery a strong identity built around battlefield control, forced movement, difficult terrain, and demon-flavored chaos. The Demonic Sorcery spell list is dramatically improved and now actually supports the theme instead of asking why a demon sorcerer has Hallow. The hosts like the revised Demonic Sorcery enough that it went from "why would I play this?" to "I would play this immediately." The new feats and epic boons are more mechanically interesting than expected, with a few strong options for social manipulation, traps, protection, and high-level anti-undead or anti-illusion play. The likely future product may be an evil campaign book, a spiritual successor to Book of Vile Darkness, or a broader fiendish/planar supplement. Overall verdict: WotC appears to be listening, the revisions are mostly better, and the villains are finally getting options that do more than look cool while failing their own saving throw. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

At levels 1 through 4, the 2014 Monk is a beautiful dream: you punch, you kick, you spend ki like a raccoon with a stolen credit card. Then levels 5 through 20 arrive, and suddenly the class asks, "Would you like to stun a dragon, run across a lake, catch a missile, become immune to poison, astral project emotionally, and still somehow worry about running out of ki before lunch?" This episode dives into the Monk's awkward, glorious, high-speed middle and late game, where every turn is a choice between tactical brilliance and blowing your entire budget on Flurry of Blows because punching four times feels spiritually correct. Show Notes In this episode of the RPGBOT.Podcast, the team continues the 2014 DnD 5e Monk breakdown by moving beyond the early levels and into the part of the class where things get weird, fast, and occasionally very effective. Levels 5 through 20 are where the Monk picks up its signature battlefield identity: mobility, disruption, defensive tricks, and the ability to make enemy spellcasters deeply regret standing within sprinting distance. The discussion centers on what Monks actually do well once Extra Attack, Stunning Strike, and higher-level ki features come online. This is not just about throwing more punches. It is about choosing when to spend ki, when to conserve it, which enemies deserve a Stunning Strike attempt, and how to use the Monk's speed to pressure weak points instead of face-tanking like a fighter with worse armor and better hamstrings. The episode also looks at the Monk's scaling problem. The class gains a lot of flavorful and useful features, but its damage can start to lag behind other martial characters unless the player leans into the Monk's strengths. That means playing like a skirmisher, controller, mage-hunter, and mobile problem solver rather than trying to win every fight by standing still and trading hits. By the late game, features like Evasion, Diamond Soul, Empty Body, and improved movement turn the Monk into something incredibly hard to pin down. You may not always be the biggest damage dealer at the table, but you can be the character who crosses the map, ruins the villain's concentration, survives the fireball, and then politely explains that gravity is more of a suggestion than a rule. Key Takeaways Level 5 is the Monk's big glow-up. Extra Attack and Stunning Strike dramatically change how the class plays, giving the Monk real battlefield control instead of just more ways to punch things. Stunning Strike is powerful, but expensive. It can shut down dangerous enemies, but burning ki on every hit is a fast road to becoming a lightly armored commoner with martial arts branding. Monks are skirmishers, not front-line tanks. Their speed, mobility, and defensive tools work best when they pick targets carefully, disrupt key enemies, and avoid getting surrounded. Ki management is the entire game. Flurry of Blows, Patient Defense, Step of the Wind, Stunning Strike, and subclass abilities all compete for the same limited resource, so every choice matters. The Monk is excellent at harassing casters and fragile backline enemies. High movement speed and multiple attacks make the Monk great at reaching enemies who thought they were safely hiding behind the big monsters. Defensive features become a major strength. Evasion, Stillness of Mind, Purity of Body, Diamond Soul, and Empty Body all help the Monk survive effects that can ruin other characters. Damage scaling can be frustrating. The Monk gets more options and survivability, but it may struggle to keep pace with optimized martial builds in raw damage. Ability scores are tight. Monks usually want Dexterity, Wisdom, and Constitution, which makes feats tempting but costly. Late-game Monks are weird in the best way. Running up walls, ignoring poison, surviving saving throws, turning invisible, and resisting damage all support the fantasy of a supernatural martial artist. The best Monk play is tactical, not automatic. The class rewards players who think about positioning, target priority, resource timing, and when not to spend ki just because the button is shiny. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

This week on the RPGBOT.Podcast, the hosts ask the eternal tabletop question: what happens when your beloved fantasy RPG grows up, gets a driver's license, discovers firearms, and immediately becomes everyone's problem? We begin with PishPash My Memory is Trash merch, accidental mug design crimes, Pride, wizard bazookas, and Ash's long-simmering legal case against the movie Bright. Then we get to the real issue: how do you let someone fight Tiamat with an Uzi without turning your campaign into a spreadsheet, a war crime, or Shadowrun with the serial numbers filed off? Show Notes In this episode, the RPGBOT crew takes a deep dive into adapting fantasy tabletop RPG systems like D&D and Pathfinder to other technology levels, including modern fantasy, science fiction, cyberpunk-adjacent worlds, post-apocalyptic settings, and anything else where a greatsword might have to share table space with a grenade launcher. Tyler walks through the history of previous attempts to drag D&D-style mechanics out of the dungeon and into other genres, including d20 Star Wars, d20 Modern, Star Wars Saga Edition, Star Wars 5e, and the often-forgotten Modern Magic Unearthed Arcana. Along the way, the hosts dig into how those systems handled things like armor, hit points, wounds, vitality, class design, talents, occupations, reputation, and the eternal question of whether getting shot with a blaster should feel worse than being poked with a longsword. The conversation turns into a practical design checklist for anyone trying to run fantasy rules in a modern or sci-fi setting. The big issues are weapons, armor, hit points, movement, vehicles, skills, tools, hacking, currency, magic, classes, monsters, and access to dangerous gear. A gun that does more damage than a sword is easy to write down. Making that gun fun, balanced, available, expensive, illegal, scary, and not immediately campaign-breaking is the actual work. The hosts also wrestle with the big philosophical question: at what point have you changed D&D so much that you should just play a different game? Tyler's rule of changing three major things makes its return, Ash argues for fantasy with modern aesthetics, Randall brings up comet-based magic awakenings and Maximum Overdrive, and everyone briefly imagines what happens when a party of adventurers has to fight a kaiju from inside a tank. Finally, the Question of the Week asks the most important dice-related question possible: what is your favorite die, and which one deserves to be thrown into the sea? Ash defends the d8 and declares war on the foot-stabbing d4. Tyler gives some love to the underappreciated d12. Randall hates the actual d100 because it is basically a tiny chaotic bowling ball that refuses to stop rolling. D20 Modern on DMsGuild (affiliate link) D20 Future on DMsGuild (affiliate link) SW5e Bright RPGBOT.Store DnD 5e modern rules UA "Modern Magic" Dan Helmick's update IMDB Maximum Overdrive Dimension 20: A Starstruck Odyssey Dice Miner (affiliate link) Key Takeaways Adapting fantasy RPGs to modern or sci-fi settings is not just about adding guns. You have to rethink combat assumptions, armor, hit points, movement, skills, equipment, enemies, and the economy. Previous d20-based games offer useful examples. d20 Star Wars experimented with wounds and vitality. d20 Modern used basic classes tied to ability scores, occupations, talents, and advanced classes. Star Wars Saga Edition showed some early design DNA that later appeared in 4e. Firearms and modern weapons change the math quickly. A pistol, rifle, grenade, or blaster can make traditional fantasy damage assumptions look very strange unless the system accounts for armor, accuracy, availability, legality, and consequences. Armor may need to work differently. In a modern game, characters probably are not walking around in plate armor, so armor might reduce damage, resist ballistic attacks, or be replaced partly by class-based defense or plot-armor-style scaling. Hit points can still work, but they need a clear interpretation. They might represent luck, stamina, near misses, tactical positioning, or cinematic survival rather than literal meat points. Vehicles change encounter design. Horses and overland travel are one thing. Cars, motorcycles, tanks, aircraft, and spaceships make movement, chase scenes, distance, and random encounters much more complicated. Skills and tools need updating. Computers, hacking, piloting, driving, engineering, and modern medicine may need to be skills, tool proficiencies, lore-style specialties, or full subsystems depending on how important they are to the campaign. The modern world makes Strength harder to justify unless the game gives it a reason to matter. Close quarters, carrying capacity, melee restrictions, grappling, armor, and specialized builds can help keep strong characters relevant. Classes may need reskinning rather than replacement. A barbarian might become a super-soldier, a rage-serum bruiser, or a minigun-wielding menace. A cleric might serve an ideal, philosophy, cosmic force, AI god, or belief system rather than a traditional deity. Magic can stay magical, become technology, or sit beside technology. Fireball might still be a spell, or it might be a grenade, a rocket launcher, a plasma weapon, or a problem for your insurance provider. Monsters still work if you treat them thoughtfully. Vampires, mind flayers, zombies, kaiju, and the Tarrasque can all survive in modern settings if their defenses, tactics, environment, and narrative role make sense. Access matters. Just because tanks, RPGs, and military hardware exist does not mean the party can buy them at Fantasy Costco. Price, legality, scarcity, black markets, and consequences are balancing tools. Currency may be better handled abstractly. Modern money can become tedious fast, so a wealth stat or resource system may work better than tracking every nickel, dime, credit card, crypto wallet, and suspicious suitcase full of cash. Tyler's three-change rule is a useful warning sign. If you need to make three huge changes to force D&D into another genre, consider whether another RPG already does what you want better. The episode's greatest lesson may be this: you can absolutely kill Tiamat with an Uzi, but first you need to know what that does to armor class, encounter balance, campaign tone, and the local black market. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Before the rogues can reach legendary proficiency, the episode must first survive the real high-level threats: Producer Dan being sleepy, Tyler's aggressively early bedtime policy, Ash explaining the freedom of having no kids, a Starfinder boss who walks through space walls, and the devastating possibility that a spider might disrupt Tyler's routine. Once everyone finally remembers this is supposed to be a Pathfinder 2e rogue episode, the party returns to levels 11 through 20, where rogues stop being "sneaky knife people" and become invisible, paralyzing, truth-proof, pants-stealing engines of felony. Show Notes This episode continues the RPGBOT.Podcast Pathfinder 2e rogue build series, picking up at level 11 and carrying the Mastermind, Scoundrel, and Ruffian builds all the way to level 20. Tyler, Ash, and Randall revisit their characters and explore what happens when rogues move beyond "I stab the off-guard guy" and into "I delete actions, rewrite memories, steal impossible objects, ignore magical detection, and turn violence into a pyramid scheme." Tyler's Mastermind continues to lean into Recall Knowledge, ranged support, and battlefield control. His rogue knows things about things, then stabs those things, then tells his friends how to stab those things better. Randall's Ruffian keeps building into the direct approach: intimidation, bleed, debilitating strikes, reactive setups, and the wonderful simplicity of punching someone so effectively that an ally also gets to hit them. Ash's Catfolk Scoundrel doubles down on deception, stealth, social nonsense, and the extremely upsetting power to convince someone that he has secretly been part of their life the whole time. The mid-level progression brings several major rogue upgrades. Critical Debilitation and Bloody Debilitation add nasty new rider effects. Greater Rogue Reflexes turns Reflex saves into a comedy routine where explosions are mostly someone else's problem. Double Debilitation lets rogues stack problems on top of problems. Master Strike gives rogues a terrifying late-game opener that can paralyze, knock unconscious, or kill a target if the dice cooperate. The episode also highlights how wild high-level skill feats become. Reveal Machinations lets Ash emotionally destroy someone by claiming to be their secret dad. Scare to Death lets Randall intimidate people so hard their hearts may simply quit. Legendary Thief opens the door to absurd theft, including the possibility of stealing weapons, armor, or, naturally, pants. Blank Slate makes Ash so good at lying that divination magic simply refuses to perceive him. True Perception gets called out as a must-have, because permanent true sight is extremely hard to argue with. By level 20, everyone converges on Enduring Debilitation because sometimes the correct answer is obvious. Extending a debilitation for a full minute is brutal, especially when it means a boss might lose a third of their actions for most of a fight. The hosts also shout out other capstone-style options like Hidden Paragon, Steel Essence, Perfect Distraction, Reactive Distraction, and Craft Anything, showing that high-level rogues can be invisible legends, impossible thieves, decoy-swapping nightmares, or walking item factories. In classic RPGBOT fashion, the episode is equal parts mechanical breakdown, build advice, and conversational derailment. It is a guide to high-level rogues, but it is also a warning: once a rogue reaches legendary proficiency, the laws of physics, social trust, and basic workplace safety are all optional. Key Takeaways This episode covers Pathfinder 2e rogues from levels 11 through 20, continuing the three builds from Part 1: Tyler's Mastermind, Ash's Catfolk Scoundrel, and Randall's Ruffian. High-level rogues become much more than sneak attackers. They gain stronger saves, better weapon proficiency, powerful debilitations, absurd skill feats, and some truly ridiculous capstone options. Incredible Scout is a strong party-facing general feat because it can improve initiative for the whole group when using the Scout exploration activity. Critical Debilitation is a standout level 12 option because slowed is one of the nastiest conditions in Pathfinder 2e, and even a success can still matter. Bloody Debilitation gives rogues a straightforward damage option by adding significant persistent bleed damage. Greater Rogue Reflexes makes rogues extremely hard to punish with Reflex-based effects, especially combined with their already strong Reflex progression. Leave an Opening is excellent for team damage because it lets an ally make a reactive strike when the rogue critically hits an off-guard target. Double Debilitation lets rogues apply two debilitations at once, but the interaction matters. If one debilitation ends, both end, so sometimes one strong debilitation is better than stacking. Reveal Machinations is one of the funniest skill feats discussed. Ash frames it as convincing an enemy that you have secretly been their father, mentor, or recurring trauma goblin all along. Scare to Death is both mechanically useful and hilarious. Even when it does not kill something outright, frightened conditions are still valuable. Dispelling Slice gives rogues a way to make casters sad by cutting through active magical effects on an off-guard target. Legendary Thief opens up absurd theft possibilities, including stealing things that should be impossible to steal under normal circumstances. Blank Slate is peak Scoundrel nonsense. Ash becomes so good at deception that detection, revelation, and scrying magic can simply fail to notice him. Powerful Sneak makes Sneak Attack more reliable by helping against precision immunity or resistance and improving low sneak attack damage rolls. Master Strike is a terrifying level 19 feature that lets rogues add a major incapacitating effect when they damage an off-guard target. True Perception gets called out as an incredible general feat because constant true sight is useful on almost any character who can qualify. Enduring Debilitation is the big level 20 winner. Making a debilitation last for a full minute can dramatically change a boss fight. Hidden Paragon, Steel Essence, Craft Anything, Perfect Distraction, and Reactive Distraction show how high-level rogues can specialize into legendary stealth, impossible theft, crafting absurdity, or decoy-based nonsense. The Mastermind becomes a knowledge-based support striker, the Ruffian becomes a fear-and-bleed melee bully, and the Scoundrel becomes a deception-fueled social and stealth menace. The real lesson: high-level rogues do not just break into places. They break action economy, memories, magic detection, enemy confidence, and possibly the pants economy. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Monks are supposed to be serene masters of body, mind, and spirit, which is adorable because in 2014 DnD 5e they mostly begin life as a lightly dressed Dex-Wis-Con spreadsheet sprinting toward danger with 10 hit points and a dream. This week, the RPGBOT crew enters the monastery to ask the big questions. Can you punch your way to enlightenment? Is ki a precious spiritual resource or just a tiny battery labeled please do not waste on disappointment? And at levels 1 through 4, are Monks ascending to greatness, or are they simply discovering that inner peace does not count as armor? Show Notes This episode begins the RPGBOT.Podcast's two-part breakdown of the 2014 DnD 5e Monk, starting where every fragile martial arts legend begins: levels 1 through 4. The crew digs into what makes the Monk exciting, frustrating, stylish, and mechanically hungry enough to eat every good ability score on your character sheet. The conversation looks at the Monk's core identity as a fast, unarmored martial character built around Dexterity, Wisdom, and Constitution. That sounds elegant until you realize the class wants all three of those stats immediately, then quietly asks whether you also had room for feats, survivability, and emotional support snacks. From Unarmored Defense to Martial Arts, the early Monk has a lot of cool tools, but not always enough breathing room to use them comfortably. The team also explores the Monk's early features, including Flurry of Blows, Slow Fall, and the looming promise of Stunning Strike. There is plenty to like here, especially for players who enjoy movement, positioning, and the fantasy of solving problems with disciplined violence. But the episode also does not shy away from the class's pain points, including limited weapon options, resource pressure, and design choices that make the Monk feel like it is constantly trying to do three jobs while dressed for yoga. Subclasses also enter the dojo, with discussion of options like Ascendant Dragon, Open Hand, Shadow, Drunken Master, Four Elements, Long Death, Mercy, and Cobalt Soul. Some bring strong flavor, some bring real mechanical value, and some bring the familiar DnD experience of reading a subclass feature and whispering, why would you do this to me? Along the way, the crew talks optimization, multiclassing, race choices, ability score improvements, and how to build a Monk that can actually survive long enough to become the terrifying battlefield blur you imagined. It is a practical, opinionated, and occasionally exasperated look at a class with fantastic vibes, uneven mechanics, and the eternal promise that someday, somehow, punching a dragon in the ankle will be a sound tactical plan. Key Takeaways The 2014 DnD 5e Monk has one of the strongest class fantasies in the game, but the mechanics can struggle to fully support it. Early Monks rely heavily on Dexterity, Wisdom, and Constitution, making them very ability-score dependent right from level 1. Unarmored Defense is flavorful and useful, but it also means the Monk needs strong stats to keep up defensively. Martial Arts gives the Monk its core identity, letting the character fight with speed, flexibility, and style without relying on heavy weapons or armor. Weapon limitations can make early Monk choices feel narrower than expected, especially compared to other martial classes. Ki is powerful but limited, so early Monks need to be careful about when they spend it and when they save it. Flurry of Blows is iconic, but it competes for the same limited resource pool as other Monk tricks. Slow Fall is useful and very funny when it works, especially if your campaign includes cliffs, towers, rooftops, or poor decisions. Stunning Strike is one of the Monk's most famous features, but its effectiveness depends heavily on enemy Constitution saves and ki availability. Subclass choice matters a lot because some Monk subclasses help solve the class's problems, while others mostly hand you a decorative ribbon and a bill. Open Hand and Mercy tend to offer more reliable mechanical value, while subclasses like Four Elements can be harder to recommend without generous table support. Shadow Monk brings strong utility and sneaky fantasy, especially for players who want mobility, stealth, and magical ninja nonsense. Ascendant Dragon adds big style and elemental flavor, giving the Monk a more dramatic combat identity. Drunken Master, Long Death, and Cobalt Soul each offer distinct flavor and tools, but their value depends heavily on campaign style and player expectations. Multiclassing can help some Monk builds, but it can also delay important class features and make an already hungry build even hungrier. Ability Score Improvements are especially important because the Monk often needs raw stats more than flashy feats. Race choice can make a meaningful difference, especially when it supports Dexterity, Wisdom, survivability, mobility, or extra utility. The Monk works best when the player leans into movement, positioning, skirmishing, and selective resource use rather than trying to stand still and trade hits like a Fighter. The class is stylish, mobile, and fun, but it asks the player to manage limitations carefully. The Monk's biggest tragedy is that it looks like a simple punch class, but underneath the robes is a complicated optimization puzzle doing parkour. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Once the table finally escapes the opening chaos and cat crimes, Tyler, Randall, and Ash dive into Pathfinder 2e rogues, proving that the class is not just a sneaky knife gremlin. It is also a walking toolbox, a social menace, a battlefield problem, and so much more Show Notes This episode begins the RPGBOT.Podcast breakdown of Pathfinder 2e rogues, covering levels 1 through 10 and exploring how the class develops from nimble opportunist into a precision-damage nightmare with more skills than common sense. Tyler, Randall, and Ash each bring a different rogue racket to the table, with Tyler building a Mastermind, Ash building a Scoundrel, and Randall building a Ruffian. The conversation starts with the rogue's core identity: Sneak Attack, off-guard targets, excellent skills, strong Reflex saves, and the sheer absurdity of getting skill increases and skill feats constantly. The hosts explain how Pathfinder rogues differ from their 5e cousins, especially around precision damage, surprise attack, and how off-guard creates the opening rogues need to ruin someone's day. From there, the builds split into very different flavors of criminal excellence. Ash's Catfolk Scoundrel leans into Feint, Deception, diversions, social trickery, and making enemies easier to stab, hide from, or fireball. Tyler's Fetchling Mastermind turns Recall Knowledge into a combat engine, using information as a weapon and building toward automatic knowledge checks, scroll utility, and ranged support. Randall's Human Ruffian takes the direct approach with medium armor, intimidation, two-weapon tricks, gang-up tactics, and eventually debilitation options that make the whole party better at hurting things. Along the way, the hosts cover important rogue build choices including ancestry feats, racket features, armor considerations, weapon selection, class feats, general feats, and the sometimes painful reality that not every tempting rogue feat is worth taking. Twist the Knife gets called out as a trap compared to easier bleed options, while Gang Up, Analyze Weakness, Clever Gambit, Distracting Feint, Dazzling Diversion, Predictive Purchase, and racket-specific debilitations all get time in the spotlight. The episode closes by emphasizing that while these builds are combat-focused, rogues are not limited to combat. With their enormous number of skill feats and skill increases, rogues can be investigators, con artists, diplomats, criminals, spies, consultants, bullies, burglars, or social wrecking balls. In true RPGBOT fashion, the takeaway is clear: you can optimize the stabbing, but you still have plenty of room left to optimize the nonsense. Key Takeaways Pathfinder 2e rogues are skill monsters. They gain more skill increases and skill feats than almost anyone else, making them great in combat, exploration, social encounters, and weird niche problem-solving. Sneak Attack is the rogue's core damage feature, but it depends on the target being off-guard and on using the right kinds of weapons or attacks. Surprise Attack helps rogues get Sneak Attack early in combat by making creatures off-guard if the rogue rolls Deception or Stealth for initiative and acts before them. Rogue rackets dramatically change how the class plays. Scoundrels manipulate enemies with Feint and Deception, Masterminds weaponize Recall Knowledge, and Ruffians use intimidation, armor, and heavier weapons to bully the battlefield. Ash's Scoundrel build focuses on Charisma, Feint, Deception, and making enemies vulnerable through off-guard, dazzled, Reflex penalties, and tactical debilitations. Tyler's Mastermind build turns Recall Knowledge into a combat strategy, using it to make enemies off-guard, trigger extra movement, support allies, and set up extra damage through Analyze Weakness. Randall's Ruffian build leans into durability, melee pressure, medium armor, intimidation, Gang Up, and debilitation options that add weaknesses or penalties to enemies. Medium armor can work for a rogue, especially a Ruffian, but noisy armor is a bad idea if you still want to sneak. Weapon choice matters. Kukris, shortbows, agile and finesse weapons, and qualifying Ruffian weapons all interact differently with Sneak Attack and critical specialization. Analyze Weakness is a strong rogue feat for builds that can reliably identify enemies, adding extra precision-style damage when the rogue wants one hit to matter more. Gang Up is excellent for melee rogues because it makes off-guard easier to trigger without needing perfect flanking positions. Twist the Knife sounds fun, but the hosts flag it as a trap because weapon runes can often provide better bleed damage with less action cost. Debilitating Strike at level 9 is a major rogue power bump, letting Sneak Attack also impose conditions like speed penalties or enfeebled. Level 10 racket-specific debilitations make rogues even nastier. Masterminds gain support-focused options, Ruffians can add damage weaknesses or clumsy, and Scoundrels can shut down reactions or flanking. The builds in this episode are combat-focused, but rogues can easily become outstanding social and exploration characters because they have so many skill feats to spend. Rogues are not just sneaky stabbers. They can be detectives, con artists, crime lords, rich bullies, diplomats, vault testers, information brokers, and every other flavor of charming disaster. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Welcome to Forgotten Odysseys, the game where surviving the Trojan War is apparently the easy part. Adam Bradford, also known as BadEye Adam, has created a MÖRK BORG-compatible Greek fantasy nightmare where the gods hate you, the sea hates you, the dice hate you, and sometimes your own party decides that prophecy is just a polite suggestion to commit murder. In this episode, the crew sets sail for home, immediately gets distracted by pork, insults a goddess, and proves that if Odysseus had access to a live Twitch chat, he probably would have died even faster. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/badeye/forgotten-odysseys Show Notes This week on the RPGBOT.Podcast, we dive into Forgotten Odysseys, the creation of Adam Bradford, also known as BadEye Adam, and currently funding on Kickstarter. Adam joins the show to talk about building a brutal, mythic Greek journey home from the Trojan War using the bones of MÖRK BORG, then Josh Simons of Broken Door Entertainment takes the helm for a live play demo that immediately proves why sailors should fear gods, storms, wild animals, and shirtless leadership. Adam walks through the inspirations behind the game, from The Odyssey and Bronze Age Greek culture to Blood of Zeus, 300, Xena, and the gloriously doomed charm of MÖRK BORG hacks. The result is a sword-and-sandals survival game where the goal is simple: get home. The problem is Eris, goddess of strife and chaos, who believes you cheated death at Troy and would very much like to correct that oversight. The episode also explores the game's seafaring tests, deadly mishaps, journey map, mythic art direction, character classes, boons, curses, legendary items, and armor system. Then the actual play begins, and the party creates Dome, Demos, and Dephobos, three heroes whose collective survival strategy includes playing "Yankee Doodle Dandy" on a lyre, hunting boars in a storm, yelling at divine fog, and ultimately fulfilling a betrayal prophecy with alarming efficiency. If you like Greek mythology, doomed sailors, lethal rules-light games, gorgeous art-heavy books, and tabletop sessions where a boar fight becomes the emotional centerpiece of the evening, this one is for you. Key Takeaways Forgotten Odysseys is Adam Bradford's mythic Greek, MÖRK BORG-compatible game about soldiers trying to survive the journey home after the Trojan War. The game is currently on Kickstarter and is published in partnership with Broken Door Entertainment. Adam wrote, illustrated, laid out, and designed the game, giving it a strong personal visual identity inspired by Greek myth, comics, public domain art, and brutal sword-and-sandals drama. The central premise is not "become a hero." It is "get home before the gods, monsters, sea, dice, or your friends kill you." Eris replaces Poseidon as the primary divine antagonist, hunting the characters because they survived when fate said they should have died. The game keeps the deadly, strange, art-heavy spirit of MÖRK BORG while adding Greek myth flavor, seafaring rules, Bronze Age gear, legendary items, boons, curses, and a journey map. Seafaring tests let everyone contribute to survival, whether they are rowing, navigating, inspiring the crew, helming the ship, or playing music to keep the oars in rhythm. Character creation leans into randomness, misery, and personality, which is how the table ends up with Dome, Demos, and Dephobos, three names that sound like they were cursed before the dice even hit the table. The live play shows off the system's fast combat, player-facing rolls, armor tiers, and high stakes, mostly through the sacred Greek tradition of nearly dying to pigs. Demos learns that boars are dangerous, Dephobos learns that prophecy is inconvenient, and Dome learns that leadership is easier when nobody questions why someone was stabbed and thrown into shallow water. The episode is a strong showcase for the game's tone: mythic, deadly, beautiful, ridiculous, and always one bad roll away from becoming a cautionary tale. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Welcome to the Abyss, the multiverse's least relaxing vacation destination, where every layer is somehow worse than the last, the locals are made of teeth and bad decisions, and the gift shop only sells trauma. This week on the RPGBOT.Podcast, we descend into the infinite chaos of demonic nonsense to ask the important questions: how do you survive a plane that actively hates zoning laws, why are demon lords like this, and at what point does a heroic expedition become an HR violation with initiative rolls? Show Notes This week, the RPGBOT.Podcast heads screaming into the Abyss, home of demons, demon lords, infinite layers, and the kind of cosmic chaos that makes ordinary campaign planning look like a polite neighborhood association meeting. The hosts explore what makes the Abyss such a dangerous and compelling place for tabletop adventures, from its shifting geography and endless hordes to the major powers that call it home. Along the way, we look at how different games and editions have handled demonic lore, including DnD 5e, classic 3.5 material, and Pathfinder's take on demon lords, qlippoth, and the Outer Rifts. It is a tour through madness, violence, temptation, and worldbuilding opportunities, with just enough useful advice to make you think visiting the Abyss might be survivable. It is not. But it might make a fantastic campaign arc. Whether you need a terrifying destination, a villainous power structure, a planar survival nightmare, or just a place where every bad idea gets promoted to management, the Abyss is ready to ruin your party's day in spectacular fashion. DnD 5e 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide (affiliate link) Monsters of the Multiverse (affiliate link) 3.5 Expedition to the Demonweb Pits (affiliate link) Pathfinder Wiki Demon Lords Qlippoth Outer Rifts Key Takeaways The Abyss is more than just Hell with worse branding. It is chaos given geography, full of infinite layers, unstable rules, and creatures that treat morality like an optional splatbook. Demons work best when they feel unpredictable, destructive, and hungry for escalation. Devils make contracts. Demons kick in the door, eat the contract, and set the room on fire. Demon lords are excellent campaign villains because they combine cosmic power, personal obsession, and the emotional stability of a cursed chainsaw. The Abyss gives DMs a huge toolbox for adventure design: survival horror, planar exploration, corruption arcs, cult plots, boss fights, doomed expeditions, and the classic question of why did we open that portal? Older DnD material and Pathfinder lore both offer rich inspiration, especially if you want the Abyss to feel bigger, stranger, and more awful than just a monster closet with lava. Qlippoth and other ancient horrors are useful when you want to remind players that demons are not necessarily the bottom of the cosmic barrel. Sometimes the barrel has teeth underneath it. The best Abyss adventures should feel dangerous before initiative is rolled. The plane itself should be part of the threat, not just the room where the demons are standing. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati  

Welcome to Part 4 of our Ravenloft: The Horrors Within review, where the real horror isn't Strahd. It's Ash's campaign. In the span of ten minutes, his players accidentally created Baba Yaga, nearly invented a magical nuclear weapon, tried to break the multiverse "just to see what happens," and immediately asked if they could automate it with a Rube Goldberg machine. At this point, the Dark Powers aren't tormenting the players. They're trying to survive them. Show Notes We wrap up our four-part review of Ravenloft: The Horrors Within by touring the remaining Domains of Dread, digging into the new monsters and NPCs, exploring haunted Bastions, and deciding whether Wizards of the Coast finally delivered the definitive Ravenloft sourcebook. Before the review even begins, Ash recounts the latest catastrophes from his home Ravenloft campaign. His players accidentally elevate a coven of hags into a new Baba Yaga, nearly tear open reality with artifacts capable of destroying demiplanes, and somehow conclude that the obvious solution is building a magical doomsday device. As always, the greatest threat to Ravenloft isn't the Dark Lords. It's the player characters. The panel finishes its tour of the remaining Domains of Dread, highlighting favorites like the haunted countryside of Mordent, Arthurian-inspired Shadowlands, Lord Soth's Sythicus, the folk-horror nightmare of Tepest, and the deadly jungle hunts of Valachan. Each domain receives new maps, campaign outlines, adventure hooks, and fully realized Dark Lord stat blocks that make them dramatically easier to run than previous editions. Attention then shifts to the new DM tools. Haunted Bastions become an instant favorite, adding supernatural events, cursed facilities, and even Backrooms-inspired liminal spaces to the 2024 Bastion system. The group also praises the new patron mechanics, expanded horror guidance, and dozens of flavorful campaign-building resources for Dungeon Masters. The bestiary proves equally impressive. New horrors range from Lovecraftian monstrosities and terrifying Relentless Killers to updated versions of classic Ravenloft creatures like the Dullahan and Grimishkas. Several monsters introduce brutal mechanics involving exhaustion, possession, regeneration, and instant death, giving horror encounters a unique identity beyond simply dealing more damage. Finally, the hosts deliver their verdict on the book. While the player-facing subclasses receive mixed reviews throughout the series, everyone agrees that The Horrors Within is a massive upgrade for Dungeon Masters. Between expanded lore, stronger adventures, memorable monsters, and fully developed Domains of Dread, this may be the best Ravenloft campaign resource Wizards has published for Fifth Edition. Ravenloft: The Horrors Within (affiliate link) RPGBOT.store - Pish Pash, My Memory is Trash! Other Stuff Rikki Tikki Tavi Roxane but it gets faster Spirited Away Content from RPGBOT.net DnD 5e Dark Gifts Guide Key Takeaways Ash's home campaign continues to prove that players are more dangerous than any Dark Lord. The remaining Domains of Dread receive substantial expansions with maps, adventures, and campaign frameworks. Shadowlands, Tepest, Mordent, and Valachan each offer unique horror genres beyond gothic vampires. Haunted Bastions are one of the most creative additions to the 2024 Bastion system. The liminal-space Bastion facility is basically the Backrooms for D&D. The bestiary introduces memorable new horrors, especially the Relentless Killer variants. Updated classic monsters receive more interesting mechanics while remaining faithful to their original themes. Named NPCs like Van Richten, Ez, Madame Eva, and the Weathermay-Foxgrove twins finally receive dedicated stat blocks. The book is packed with campaign hooks, DM tools, and adventure ideas that make Ravenloft easier than ever to run. Final verdict: player options are somewhat uneven, but for Dungeon Masters this is an outstanding sourcebook and one of the strongest setting books Wizards has released for the 2024 rules. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Ravenloft is a setting built on fear, tragedy, and impossible choices. Naturally, we spent the first ten minutes arguing about whether Florida is its own Domain of Dread, listening to Ash tell a story about getting magically demoted from noble to peasant, and debating whether "lofting ravens" is a real phrase. Honestly, the Dark Powers couldn't have written a better introduction. Show Notes In Part 3 of our review of Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, we finally leave the player options behind and dive into the heart of the setting itself. Wizards of the Coast dramatically expands the Domains of Dread, providing campaign frameworks, detailed gazetteers, new maps, Dark Lord stat blocks, horror advice, Tarokka options, and enough adventure hooks to keep a party terrified for months. We begin by exploring the overall structure of the book and immediately appreciate how much more usable it is than Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. Every major domain now includes lore, locations, horror themes, campaign outlines, one-shot adventures, and, perhaps most importantly, fully realized stat blocks for the Dark Lords themselves. No more "just use the Spy stat block." From Barovia to Lamordia, we tour some of Ravenloft's most iconic locations. We revisit Strahd's eternal torment, explore the political nightmare of Borca, marvel at Darkon's crumbling reality, survive Falkovnia's endless zombie siege, admire Har'Akir's gorgeous redesign, and gush over Lamordia's expanded support. Along the way we discover that some Domains received spectacular glow-ups while others inspired... spirited debate. Not every addition lands equally. The panel spends considerable time discussing Innsmouth and Cthulhu's inclusion, questioning whether cosmic horror fits Ravenloft's core theme of ironic punishment and personal damnation. The conversation turns into an entertaining deep dive on what actually makes a Dark Lord compelling and why some monsters work better as unknowable forces than boss encounters. By the end of the episode, one thing is clear: even with a few controversial choices, The Horrors Within dramatically improves Ravenloft as a campaign setting. Better maps, better adventures, better stat blocks, and substantially more support make this feel like the definitive version of the Domains of Dread. Key Takeaways The setting chapters are the standout portion of the book. Every major Domain of Dread receives significantly expanded support compared to Van Richten's Guide. Every major Dark Lord finally has a unique stat block worthy of an epic confrontation. New maps, campaign outlines, and one-shot adventures make the book far easier to run. Tarokka cards now tie directly into individual Domains and Dark Lords, adding flavorful campaign tools. Horror guidance remains solid, especially for GMs running gothic horror for the first time. Several redesigned Domains, especially Har'Akir and Lamordia, receive high praise for their presentation and atmosphere. Innsmouth and Cthulhu spark the episode's biggest debate, with questions about whether cosmic horror belongs in Ravenloft's established mythology. Lamordia emerges as one of the panel's favorite sections thanks to its expanded lore, updated locations, and memorable adventure hooks. Despite a handful of criticisms, the group considers the setting material a substantial improvement over previous Ravenloft sourcebooks. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

So today's episode is about the Help action, the mechanic that exists so your party can finally contribute after rolling three consecutive natural 2s. We'll answer life's toughest questions: Is sacrificing your turn to give someone advantage actually worth it? Can an owl legally become the MVP of every combat? And how many class features can be stacked before your DM quietly starts targeting the familiar instead? Grab your emotional support Help action, because we're about to optimize teamwork so hard your rogue might actually say 'thanks.' Show Notes The Help action looks simple on paper: spend your action so someone else can do better. In practice, it's one of the most misunderstood and surprisingly powerful mechanics in D&D 5e. This week we dive into every angle of helping, from the basic combat rules to the mountain of class features, feats, spells, familiars, summons, and character builds that can turn a supporting role into the strongest play at the table. Along the way we discuss when giving advantage is mathematically better than attacking yourself, which subclasses excel at battlefield support, why certain familiars have become infamous for abusing the Help action, and how teamwork changes depending on your party composition. Whether you're building a dedicated support character or just trying to squeeze more value out of your turn, we break down when helping is heroic, when it's optimal, and when you're just enabling the barbarian's bad decisions. As always, expect plenty of rules discussion, optimization advice, friendly arguments, and a few detours into the weird corners of D&D design. Key Takeaways The Help action is stronger than many players realize. Giving another character advantage is often worth more than making a mediocre attack yourself. Action economy matters. A Help action isn't free. The value depends on what you're giving up and what your ally gains in return. Advantage scales with powerful attacks. Helping a rogue land Sneak Attack or a paladin land a massive Smite is often far more valuable than helping someone make a routine weapon attack. Familiars are support superstars. Features like Find Familiar, particularly with mobile options such as owls, can generate enormous tactical value by delivering Help while staying relatively safe. Some classes are built to support. Bards, certain Clerics, Battle Masters, Mastermind Rogues, and other support-focused subclasses have numerous ways to improve allies beyond simply casting buffs. Positioning is everything. The best support characters understand movement, sight lines, opportunity attacks, and initiative order just as much as damage optimization. Support isn't passive play. A well-played support character constantly makes tactical decisions that influence the entire battlefield. Not every Help action is a good Help action. Sometimes attacking, casting a spell, controlling the battlefield, or eliminating a threat is the better choice. Build synergy beats individual optimization. Characters designed to complement each other routinely outperform groups built around individual damage numbers. Helping extends beyond combat. Outside encounters, the Help action can dramatically improve skill checks when the assisting character can meaningfully contribute. Know your table. Some groups naturally coordinate tactics, while others benefit from discussing teamwork before combat begins. The best support players make everyone else look awesome. Good teamwork often creates the most memorable moments in a campaign, even if the support character never lands the finishing blow. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

The real horror in Ravenloft wasn't ghosts, vampires, or eldritch patrons. It was Riverside updating its interface five minutes before recording. Suddenly the buttons moved, the fonts shrank every time someone mentioned the layout, and Tyler entered a state of existential panic usually reserved for failed concentration checks. By the end of the night, we had learned two important lessons. First, change is terrifying. Second, apparently none of us can remember how to spell Ricky-Ticky-Tavi. Show Notes In Part 2 of our review of Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, we tackled the remaining subclasses and discovered that the second half of the book delivered some of the strongest player options in the entire release. Between ghost-powered rogues, shadow puppies, and undead warlocks, there was plenty to like. We started with the Phantom Rogue and found ourselves impressed by how well the subclass grows over time. While the early levels still feel sparse, Tokens of the Departed remains one of the coolest thematic mechanics in the game. Collecting fragments of souls and consulting them for answers creates exactly the kind of spooky roleplaying we want from Ravenloft. Next came Shadow Sorcery, and to everyone's relief, the beloved Hound of Ill Omen survived the transition to 5.5. The shadow puppy is back, the subclass still delivers incredible battlefield control, and several improvements make it one of the standout options in the book. This may finally be proof that Wizards remembers sorcerers are allowed to have nice things. We wrapped up with the Undead Patron Warlock, which continues to deliver strong flavor and solid mechanics. Form of Dread remains fantastic, and the subclass still excels at making enemies regret standing anywhere near the warlock. Meanwhile, we somehow spent far too much time debating damage dice, exhaustion mechanics, and whether exploding yourself counts as a valid combat strategy. By the end of the review, we came away feeling far more positive about the second half of the book than the first. Not every option is perfect, but there are several subclasses here we'd happily bring to a full campaign. Assuming, of course, that the recording software doesn't change its layout again first. Links Ravenloft: The Horrors Within (affiliate link) RPGBOT.store - Pish Pash, My Memory is Trash! Other Stuff Rikki Tikki Tavi Roxane but it gets faster Spirited Away Content from RPGBOT.net DnD 5e Dark Gifts Guide Key Takeaways Phantom Rogue starts slowly but becomes increasingly interesting at higher levels. Tokens of the Departed remains one of the most flavorful mechanics in the game. Shadow Sorcery successfully preserved the fan-favorite Hound of Ill Omen. The shadow puppy is still the best boy. Shadow Sorcerer is one of the biggest winners in the book. Undead Patron Warlock retains its strong theme and useful combat tools. Form of Dread continues to be one of the coolest transformation abilities available to warlocks. Several subclasses benefited from updates that fixed earlier Unearthed Arcana concerns. The second half of the book contains more hits than misses. Software updates remain more frightening than anything found in Ravenloft. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Ravenloft is supposed to be full of gothic horror, tragic villains, and creeping dread. Instead, we somehow spent twenty minutes imagining a Midwestern Strahd saying You betcha before drinking your blood, arguing about wet burritos, and debating whether North Dakota counts as a real place. By the time we actually opened the book, the greatest horror wasn't the Dark Powers. It was realizing that someone somewhere willingly ordered a hot wet beef sandwich. Sponsor Spotlight: Mithos This episode is sponsored by Mithos, a modular, system-agnostic digital toolkit designed to make life easier for Game Masters. With customizable layouts, built-in player views, fog of war support, encounter tools, and an active community sharing content, Mithos helps keep your game running smoothly without juggling a dozen browser tabs. Whether you're running Dungeons & Dragons at a convention, Call of Cthulhu in a cabin, or your favorite indie RPG at home, Mithos puts everything you need in one place. Best of all, there are no subscriptions and no internet connection required. Learn more at rpgbot.net/mithos. Show Notes We finally returned to Ravenloft with The Horrors Within and dug into the new player options from Wizards of the Coast. Along the way we examined the subclasses, talked about what survived from the Unearthed Arcana playtest, and debated whether some of the changes actually improved the designs or simply made them safer. The Reanimator Artificer immediately caught our attention with its wonderfully creepy flavor. We loved the concept of Frankensteining together an undead companion and modifying it over time, even if the final numbers often felt disappointingly conservative. The subclass oozes atmosphere, but several features left us wishing Wizards had trusted the design enough to let it hit a little harder. The College of Spirits Bard received some welcome improvements from the playtest version. Moving the random spirit effects away from mandatory immediate use made the subclass far more practical, and controlled channeling solved many of the frustrations we had previously identified. This version finally delivers on the fantasy of consulting strange entities from beyond without constantly fighting against the mechanics. We also revisited the Grave Domain Cleric and looked at the redesigned Path to the Grave. While the old version was undeniably flashier, the new implementation is much easier to use in any party composition. It may not create those huge cinematic damage spikes anymore, but it provides reliable support every time it comes online. As always, our review quickly spiraled into side discussions involving Call of Cthulhu, sturgeon festivals, Midwestern rivalries, taxes, and the eternal mystery of why so many fantasy character illustrations are suspiciously attractive. That's just another day at the RPGBOT.Podcast. Key Takeaways Ravenloft: The Horrors Within delivers strong gothic flavor and some excellent artwork. The Reanimator Artificer has fantastic thematic design but several mechanics feel overly cautious. Lightning interactions with the undead companion create some amusing and creative tactics. College of Spirits Bard benefited significantly from feedback and is much easier to play effectively. Controlled Channeling fixes many of the frustrations from the Unearthed Arcana version. Grave Domain Cleric lost some of its explosive potential but gained consistency. The revised Path to the Grave works better across a wider variety of party compositions. Several subclasses showcase great ideas that feel slightly undertuned. Flavor and atmosphere are consistently strong throughout the book. No matter how serious the subject matter becomes, the conversation will eventually derail into food arguments, regional insults, or bizarre fantasy accents. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Warlocks are the only class where the phrase "I signed a terrible contract and somehow came out ahead" counts as a character concept. By level 20, your patron has become equal parts sugar daddy, eldritch therapist, and extended warranty scammer. Somewhere between your third Eldritch Invocation and your fourth existential crisis, you stop asking whether the power is worth the cost and start asking if your soul came with roadside assistance. Show Notes In the second half of the Warlock deep dive, we continue advancing our example characters from level 5 all the way to level 20, exploring how the class evolves from a reliable blaster into one of the most customizable spellcasters in 2014 D&D 5e. Along the way we discuss new spell options, increasingly specialized Eldritch Invocations, Pact Boon upgrades, and the always-interesting challenge of squeezing maximum value out of a very limited number of spell slots. As the builds mature, we compare different approaches to survivability, damage output, and utility. The conversation highlights how Warlocks reward careful planning while still leaving plenty of room for weird and thematic choices. Whether you're building a Hexblade, Fiend, or something stranger, the class offers countless ways to personalize your character. Naturally, no discussion of Warlocks would be complete without jokes about selling your soul, suspicious contracts, and patrons who definitely read the fine print that you ignored. Between optimization advice and increasingly ridiculous examples, we discover that eldritch power and bad life decisions make an excellent combination. Key Takeaways Level 5 is a major power spike thanks to 3rd-level spells and additional Eldritch Invocation options. Invocations continue to define a Warlock's identity throughout higher levels. Pact Boons and invocation choices can dramatically change how two Warlocks of the same subclass play. Short rests remain essential because Pact Magic depends heavily on recovering spell slots frequently. Gift of the Ever-Living Ones and other defensive options can greatly improve survivability. Blade-focused builds use options like Thirsting Blade to keep pace with martial classes. Mystic Arcanum provides access to powerful high-level spells without changing the core Pact Magic system. Warlocks excel when players specialize rather than trying to do everything at once. The class rewards planning and understanding how individual features interact. Flavor and mechanics blend exceptionally well, making Warlocks one of the most thematic classes in 5e. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

The Plane of Water episode started exactly how you'd expect an episode about endless oceans to start: with stock prices, GTA 6 rumors, GameStop drama, and Randall suggesting you could solve inflation by storing barrels of oil in your apartment. Eventually everyone remembered there was supposed to be a podcast, which unfortunately meant confronting Ash's greatest weakness: deep water. What followed was less a lore episode and more a two-hour intervention where Tyler discovered underwater spiders exist, Randall weaponized ocean facts, and Ash spent the entire recording questioning every life choice that led him to this point. Somewhere beneath all the existential dread, there was also a Plane of Water. Show Notes This week we dove into one of the most intimidating locations in fantasy gaming: the Plane of Water. Despite containing an infinite amount of something every living creature needs, none of us sounded particularly excited to visit. We explored how the Plane of Water differs between Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder, from endless oceans and violent storms to strange underwater civilizations and terrifying megafauna. Along the way, we examined water genies, krakens, mysterious cities, giant jellyfish stretching across entire planes, and even an anglerfish so enormous that someone thought building a city on its back was a good idea. Pathfinder's version introduced even stranger concepts, including underwater suns, spheres filled with mysterious civilizations, and the return of elemental forces that literally control the tides. As expected, Ash spent much of the episode reliving childhood trauma and explaining why the ocean is secretly the most horrifying place imaginable. Tyler accidentally made things worse by introducing underwater spiders, while Randall enthusiastically contributed increasingly disturbing facts about deep-sea pressure, giant creatures, and dream-fueled tsunami nightmares. By the end, we learned that the Plane of Water contains incredible adventure opportunities, beautiful locations, and fascinating lore. We also learned that Ash would still rather spend a weekend in Hell. Links   2014 Dungeon Master's Guide (affiliate link) 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide (affiliate link) Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes (affiliate link) PF2 Rage of Elements (affiliate link) Forgotten Realms Wiki - Elemental Plane of Water Pathfinder Wiki - Plane of Water RPGBOT.Podcast Episodes The Abyss Arborea Archeron Arcadia The Beastlands Bytopia Carceri Celestia Elysium The Ethereal Plane The Feywild Gehenna Hades Hell Part 1 Hell Part 2 Limbo Mechanus Pandemonium Plane of Air Plane of Fire Shadowfell Other Stuff Dodgeball Movie Key Takeaways The Plane of Water in D&D is an endless ocean punctuated by occasional islands, violent storms, and regions ranging from sunlit seas to terrifying depths. Pathfinder's Plane of Water differs significantly, featuring a spherical structure, strange environmental effects, and unusual landmarks. Water genies and merfolk civilizations provide opportunities for diplomacy and exploration rather than constant combat. Krakens, brine dragons, and other aquatic monsters make the plane dangerous, but many creatures are simply focused on surviving in their own environment. Several bizarre megafauna inhabit Pathfinder's version of the plane, including continent-sized jellyfish and city-carrying anglerfish. Travel to the plane is possible through spells, portals, storms, and occasionally terrible luck. The Plane of Water offers strong inspiration for survival adventures, nautical campaigns, and cosmic horror themes. Despite its beauty and rich lore, at least one member of the cast would prefer literally any other destination. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Nobody expected the second half of the cleric episode to begin with a discussion about wolves conducting hate crimes against coyotes, crows acting as aerial bounty hunters, and the lasting trauma of Game of Thrones season eight. Somehow this naturally transitioned into Pathfinder clerics, giant dragon towers, vampire bat transformations, and a godless revolutionary whose greatest enemy remains organized religion. In hindsight, this was probably the only possible outcome. Show Notes In the second half of our Pathfinder 2e Cleric build series, we advanced our morally questionable holy figures from level 11 all the way to 20. Before we even reached the introduction, however, we somehow found ourselves discussing wolf vendettas, crow conspiracies, Game of Thrones, British pronunciation crimes, and Pulp Fiction-inspired monologues. Naturally, this was exactly the kind of preparation required for high-level clerics. Randall returned with his godless anti-religious war priest, continuing his crusade to dismantle divine authority while simultaneously benefiting from divine magic. The contradictions only made the character stronger. Ash continued building a dragon-obsessed kobold servant of Dahak, leaning heavily into domains, summoning magic, and draconic heritage feats. Tyler doubled down on his undead survival machine, creating a cleric who would rather become increasingly horrifying than ever experience death again. As the builds progressed, the characters became increasingly absurd. Randall evolved into a social revolutionary capable of literally preaching atheism to enemies. Ash transformed into a majestic kobold empowered by dragons and armed with enough fire to solve nearly any problem. Tyler embraced his inner vampire, eventually turning into a bat, draining enemies, and becoming nearly impossible to kill. High-level spells stole much of the spotlight. Summoning dragons, collapsing enemies with Implosion, unleashing Massacre, and transforming into avatars of divine power all showcased just how spectacular Pathfinder's spellcasters become in the late game. Meanwhile, Randall's philosophy remained unchanged: peace is important, and anyone who disagrees can discuss it with the business end of a glaive. By the time we reached level 20, our collection of short kings had somehow become terrifying demigods. None of them were remotely good people, but they were certainly memorable clerics. Key Takeaways Levels 11 through 20 dramatically increase a cleric's power through doctrines, master spellcasting, and powerful class feats. High-rank divine spells provide some of the most cinematic effects in Pathfinder 2e. Harm-focused builds can become incredibly durable through self-healing and defensive feats. Domain spells continue to scale well into the highest levels of play. Heritage feats can dramatically shape a character's identity and capabilities. Avatar provides one of the most flavorful capstone spells available to divine casters. Additional 10th-rank spell slots are difficult to pass up at level 20. Warpriests gain survivability but still lag behind dedicated martial classes in weapon proficiency. Pathfinder 2e offers many ways to support unusual character concepts, including technically illegal godless clerics. Team Fun Size successfully evolved from weird clerics into full-blown nightmares for any GM. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Every Warlock player starts with the same innocent thought: I just want a mysterious patron and some spooky magic. Three hours later you're reading invocation combinations like you're optimizing a tax return and trying to explain to the party why your character absolutely needed a sentient book, a telepathic connection to an ancient horror, and a cantrip that solves all of life's problems. Somehow, the answer is always Eldritch Blast. Show Notes We kick off our look at Warlocks by exploring the first four levels of one of the most customizable classes in 5e. From choosing your patron to selecting spells and invocations, we discuss how early decisions shape the entire character and why Warlocks punch far above their weight despite their limited spell slots. Along the way, we break down the strengths and weaknesses of Pact Magic, examine the importance of short rests, and discuss which options provide the biggest impact in the early game. We also talk about common traps, favorite spell choices, and how invocations turn a simple spellcaster into something uniquely weird. Whether you're building a blaster, a battlefield controller, or just someone who made a very questionable life decision with an extraplanar entity, levels 1 through 4 are where the foundation of your character really comes together. Key Takeaways Patron choice defines much of your playstyle and provides important features right from level 1. Warlocks rely on a small number of spell slots, making careful spell selection extremely important. Short rest recovery is a major source of the class's power and changes how the class feels compared to other casters. Eldritch Invocations are one of the most flexible customization systems in the game. Eldritch Blast often becomes the foundation of many builds, especially when combined with key invocations. Early-level spell choices can dramatically improve survivability, utility, and damage output. Level 2 is a major power spike thanks to invocations. Level 3 introduces Pact Boons, opening up very different character concepts and playstyles. Level 4 provides an Ability Score Improvement or feat, allowing players to further specialize their build. Warlocks reward planning and system mastery, but even simple builds can be highly effective. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Somewhere in Golarion, a tiny halfling cleric stands on a battlefield declaring that war is bad and violence solves nothing. Seconds later, he charges into combat with a hammer-and-sickle-decorated glaive, threatening to enforce peace by force. Meanwhile, a dragon-worshiping kobold is handing out experimental body modifications like coupons, and an undead enthusiast is one bad day away from becoming a lich because dying once was already one time too many. Somehow, this became a cleric episode. Show Notes This week we tackled Pathfinder 2e Clerics from levels 1 through 10 and quickly discovered that none of us had any intention of making wholesome heal-bots. Instead, we ended up with a collection of morally questionable short kings dedicated to violence, dragons, and undeath. Before diving into the builds, we spent some time discussing Pathfinder's deities, faiths, and philosophies. Ash walked through the Laws of Mortality philosophy, which somehow manages to oppose religion while occasionally becoming just as fanatical as the people it criticizes. Randall immediately embraced the concept and created a pacifist war priest whose solution to conflict is apparently more conflict. Ash also shared details from a new Starfinder campaign involving amnesiac characters trapped aboard a failing space station, creepy recordings, reality-bending horrors, and accusations of stealing ideas from Randall. Ash clarified that any theft was actually from Knights of the Old Republic II, which is apparently perfectly acceptable. Once the episode officially started, we built three very different clerics. Tyler embraced undeath through Urgathoa, focusing on survivability and refusing to ever experience death again. Ash created a dragon-obsessed kobold devoted to Dahak with enough fire and draconic abilities to make every problem look flammable. Randall built a tiny anti-war field medic whose philosophy boils down to peace through overwhelming force. Along the way we discussed doctrines, domains, divine fonts, Battle Harbingers, favorite weapons, and why evil gods consistently seem to have the coolest toys. By the end of the first ten levels, we had accidentally assembled Team Fun Size: three short clerics with deeply questionable life choices and entirely too much confidence. Key Takeaways Pathfinder clerics are extremely front-loaded and gain many important features at level 1. Faiths and philosophies offer interesting roleplaying options but usually provide fewer mechanical benefits than traditional deities. Warpriests gain armor and weapon advantages while Cloistered Clerics focus more heavily on spellcasting. Divine Fonts are far more flexible after the remaster because they no longer depend on Charisma. Harm-focused clerics can become surprisingly durable through self-healing and temporary hit points. Domains provide powerful focus spells and can dramatically shape a cleric's playstyle. Battle Harbinger and class archetypes show how Pathfinder 2e can radically alter classes without creating entirely new ones. Short ancestries apparently became an accidental theme, resulting in Team Fun Size. Randall's anti-war cleric demonstrated that ideals and practical solutions do not always align. Ash's Starfinder campaign premise proves that creepy space stations never go out of style. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

After two actual play episodes, we finally sat down to answer the important questions. Why was there a demon in the basement? Why were people making drugs out of supernatural whale juice? Why did our cult immediately choose violence as a conflict resolution strategy? And perhaps most importantly, how many times can you accidentally make things worse before it becomes your crew's official business model? As it turns out, the answer is "a lot." And somehow that's exactly how Blades in the Dark is supposed to work. Show Notes We wrapped up our Blades in the Dark series by pulling back the curtain on everything that happened during the score. Randall finally revealed what was actually going on behind the scenes, explaining the Grey Cloaks, the corrupt Bluecoats, the illegal refinery, and the fact that our crew only uncovered about thirty percent of the mystery. Somehow, despite missing most of the conspiracy, we still managed to completely ruin everyone's plans. From there, we dug into the mechanics that make Blades in the Dark feel different from traditional fantasy RPGs. We talked about consequences, stress, trauma, healing, advancement, and how the game expects complications to drive the story rather than stop it. Coming from games like Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder, we spent some time discussing how strange it feels when success and consequences regularly happen at the same time. The downtime system ended up being one of the most interesting parts of the discussion. Recovering from injuries, indulging vices, reducing heat, building territory, and even potentially spending time in prison all create opportunities for new stories instead of simply resetting everything between adventures. Apparently prison gangs and ghost cults can coexist surprisingly well. By the end of the episode, we came away with a better appreciation for how tightly the mechanics and setting work together. Blades in the Dark constantly rewards messy stories, weird complications, and players who are willing to embrace disaster. Which is fortunate, because disaster seems to be our party's greatest strength. Key Takeaways The crew only uncovered a fraction of the conspiracy surrounding the illegal refinery The Grey Cloaks hired the crew to expose corruption tied to the Bluecoats The operation involved trapped spirits, electroplasm extraction, and an imprisoned demon Blades in the Dark expects consequences to create new stories instead of ending them Stress and trauma are resources that players are encouraged to spend and manage Downtime activities allow characters to heal, reduce stress, train, and pursue projects Heat and Wanted Levels create long-term consequences for reckless crews Prison and faction politics can become entire story arcs in longer campaigns Claims and territory expansion give crews long-term goals beyond individual scores Advancement is tied to roleplaying choices and embracing character flaws The setting and mechanics are deeply connected, making the world feel integral to gameplay Our cult somehow solved a major criminal conspiracy while understanding only about thirty percent of what was actually happening Releasing a demon may not have been the original mission objective, but it certainly made the score memorable Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Every adventuring party has that one person who looks at an ancient magical artifact and immediately thinks, I can improve this. In this episode, we continue our journey through the Artificer and explore what happens when a character combines magical talent, engineering confidence, and absolutely no respect for reasonable safety standards. The result is a class that can solve problems, create new problems, and somehow convince the rest of the party that both outcomes were part of the plan. Show Notes The Artificer continues to stand apart as one of the most unique classes in modern fantasy roleplaying games. In this second installment of our Artificer deep dive, we move beyond the basics and dig into the class features, mechanics, and choices that transform a clever inventor into a walking magical toolbox. We examine how the class blends spellcasting, utility, and support capabilities while maintaining remarkable flexibility. Along the way, we discuss infusions, equipment choices, subclass considerations, and the many ways Artificers can fill gaps in a party composition. Whether you're building a heavily armored front-line inventor, a battlefield support specialist, or a gadget-obsessed problem solver, the class offers an impressive range of options. As always, we explore both the strengths and limitations of the design, highlight practical build advice, and discuss how players can get the most value out of their magical inventions without accidentally turning every session into a product demonstration. Key Takeaways Artificers thrive on versatility and can adapt to a wide variety of party roles. Infusions remain one of the class's defining features and provide significant customization opportunities. Equipment selection often has a larger impact on performance than it does for many other classes. The class rewards players who enjoy planning ahead and thinking creatively about problem solving. Artificers excel at supporting allies through magical items, utility options, and flexible spellcasting. Resource management and preparation are important for maximizing the class's effectiveness. Different subclass choices can dramatically change how the character functions at the table. The class often shines brightest when solving challenges outside of combat. Creative use of tools and class features can frequently accomplish things that other classes cannot. Understanding how your infusions, spells, and equipment interact is key to building an effective character. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Every tabletop group eventually reaches a point where someone says, We should absolutely not do that. In this episode, that point arrives roughly every thirty seconds. Faced with a secret ghost-harvesting operation, a trapped demon, corrupt Bluecoats, and enough evidence to bring down an entire criminal enterprise, our heroes make a series of carefully considered decisions such as stealing haunted jars, feeding a paralyzed rival to a demon, and debating whether releasing an eldritch horror is a reasonable business strategy. Somehow, these are not even the worst ideas discussed. Show Notes The second part of our Blades in the Dark actual play drops us back into the depths beneath a seemingly ordinary apothecary, where Roper and Talon discover that the illegal leviathan blood refinery is hiding something far worse than drug manufacturing. What begins as a simple investigation quickly spirals into ghost prisons, demonic experiments, and the sort of moral decision-making that only a cult dedicated to a vampire bat god could justify. After encountering a mysterious hospital-like corridor filled with dying victims, the crew discovers that the entire area has been sealed off from the ghost field using occult runes. The situation becomes even stranger when a dead body fails to trigger the usual supernatural alarms, leading Roper to investigate through the ghost field and uncover evidence of a much larger operation at work. Following clues deeper into the complex reveals the refinery's true purpose. Rather than merely refining leviathan blood, the operation is harvesting spirits from dying people and draining them to produce electroplasm. Rows of trapped ghosts, spirit jars, and meticulous records provide the evidence the crew needs, but things become personal when Roper discovers that an old rival named Flint is directly involved in the scheme. The score reaches peak Blades in the Dark chaos when the crew encounters a captive demon being drained for its blood. Faced with an immobilized enemy, a suffering demon, and absolutely no adult supervision, Talon and Roper decide that feeding Flint to the demon is the most efficient solution available. The plan works far better than anyone expected, which immediately makes it everyone's problem. Armed with demon blood, stolen spirit jars, incriminating documents, and several future psychological scars, the cult narrowly escapes while the facility collapses into supernatural disaster behind them. The result is a perfect demonstration of how Blades in the Dark rewards bold decisions, terrible ideas, and players who are willing to embrace the consequences of both. Key Takeaways The score showcases how investigation, stealth, and horror can blend seamlessly in Blades in the Dark. Attuning to the ghost field reveals hidden truths while often creating entirely new problems. The refinery's true purpose is harvesting spirits from dying people and converting them into electroplasm. Spirit jars, hospital records, and captured ghosts provide concrete evidence of the criminal operation. Teamwork mechanics allow players to combine actions and improve their chances of success during critical moments. Talon's alchemical abilities repeatedly save the operation, from paralysis poisons to perfectly timed smoke bombs. Roper's professional hatred of Flint becomes a surprisingly effective motivator. The crew discovers a demon being harvested for its blood, adding another layer to the facility's horrors. Sometimes the easiest way to deal with a rival is letting a demon handle the problem for you. Whether that is a good idea remains debatable. The episode highlights one of Blades in the Dark's greatest strengths: success often comes from turning disasters into opportunities rather than avoiding disasters entirely. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Every villain thinks they're the hero of their own story. This episode proves that sometimes they're right, and that's what makes them dangerous. Joined by James D'Amato and Dillin Apelyan, we set out to discuss villain backstories and somehow end up creating a supernatural cat-themed criminal mastermind based on Tyler's cat Cora. The result is equal parts masterclass, therapy session, and cautionary tale about what happens when a cat gains both motivation and opposable thumbs. Show Notes This week we welcome James D'Amato and Dillin Apelyan from the One Shot Podcast Network to discuss the art of creating memorable tabletop RPG villains. Drawing from their new book, The Ultimate RPG Villain Backstory Guide, we explore how Game Masters can move beyond simple evil-for-the-sake-of-evil antagonists and build villains with goals, beliefs, flaws, and histories that make them feel alive. The conversation examines why great villains are often reflections of the heroes themselves. We discuss how similar experiences can lead one character toward heroism and another toward villainy, and why understanding a villain's motivations often makes them more frightening rather than more sympathetic. A villain does not need redemption to be compelling. Sometimes knowing exactly why they became terrible only makes their choices more horrifying. To demonstrate the process, the group builds a villain from scratch using exercises from the book. Starting with the simple premise of Tyler's attention-seeking cat, we gradually construct a complex antagonist with needs, ideology, grudges, and a worldview that justifies increasingly terrible behavior. The exercise highlights how quickly a few well-designed prompts can transform a joke character into someone players would genuinely remember. We also discuss villain archetypes, the value of supporting indie RPG creators, experiences within the broader tabletop community, and how character motivations can create richer stories at the table. By the end of the episode, listeners will have practical tools for creating antagonists who challenge players emotionally as well as mechanically. Key Takeaways Great villains are people first and villains second. The most memorable antagonists have understandable desires, fears, and motivations. Even when their actions are unforgivable, players should be able to understand how they arrived at those decisions. A villain does not need to be sympathetic to be interesting. Learning a villain's history is not about excusing their actions. In many cases, understanding their choices makes them even more terrifying because they knowingly embraced a destructive path. Villains become stronger when they reflect the heroes. Some of the best antagonists share experiences, values, or struggles with the protagonists. The difference is often how they responded to those challenges, creating powerful thematic contrasts. Motivation matters more than evil. Players engage more deeply with villains who are pursuing something meaningful to them rather than simply causing destruction. Goals, needs, and personal stakes create stronger stories than random cruelty. Villain archetypes are tools, not restrictions. The book's archetypes can be combined to create unique antagonists. Mixing traits from multiple archetypes allows Game Masters to build villains that feel distinct and unpredictable. Corruption is often more interesting than conquest. Some villains do not just want to win. They want to prove they are right by pulling others into their worldview, tempting heroes and bystanders to compromise their values along the way. The people around a villain matter. Followers, allies, rivals, and victims help define who a villain is. These relationships create story hooks, reveal personality traits, and show the broader impact of the villain's actions. Small details create memorable antagonists. A villain's habits, grudges, insecurities, and personal beliefs often leave a stronger impression than their grand plans. Players remember personalities more than stat blocks. Building villains can be surprisingly collaborative. The episode's running joke about Cora evolves into a fully realized antagonist because everyone contributes ideas and follows the logical consequences of those choices. Villain creation often works best as an iterative process. Every campaign can benefit from a villain who feels alive. Whether your antagonist is a dark lord, corrupt noble, cult leader, or attention-starved cat, giving them a believable history and motivation will make every encounter more meaningful. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

The Artificer is the only class in D&D where a player can confidently say, I have a solution for this, then spend forty-five minutes opening character sheets, checking infusions, reorganizing inventory, building a robot dog, enchanting a teapot, and accidentally inventing OSHA violations. Meanwhile the Barbarian solved the problem by hitting it with a chair twenty minutes ago. Show Notes This week we rolled up our sleeves, emptied the tool bag onto the workbench, and dove into one of D&D's most complicated and delightfully chaotic classes. The Artificer promises magic, gadgets, inventions, and endless customization, but it also comes with enough moving parts to make some Wizards nervous. We explored what makes the class tick, where it shines, and why it rewards players who enjoy fiddling with builds as much as actually playing them. The class is built around adaptability, magical crafting, and having an answer for almost every problem if you planned ahead enough. We dug into subclass choices and the different flavors of magical engineering. Whether you want potion-fueled support, a walking tank suit, magical artillery, or a robot companion ready to throw itself into danger, there is an option that fits. The discussion highlighted how each subclass dramatically changes the feel of the character while still keeping that core identity of magical problem solver intact. Of course, being an Artificer also means embracing analysis paralysis. Spells, infusions, tools, prepared items, crafting decisions, and magic item choices all compete for your attention. If you love optimization puzzles this class is paradise. If not, you may suddenly understand why the Fighter sleeps so well at night. Key Takeaways Artificers thrive on versatility and can fill support, utility, blasting, healing, and frontline roles depending on build choices. Infusions are one of the class's defining features and effectively let characters hand out custom magic items early in a campaign. Subclass selection heavily shapes playstyle: Alchemist focuses on support and healing Armorer becomes a magical tank Artillerist leans into blasting Battle Smith gains the Steel Defender companion The class rewards players who enjoy planning, tinkering, and character optimization more than simple turn-by-turn gameplay. Tool proficiencies and crafting are central to the fantasy, even if tables vary widely in how often they matter. The Artificer's spellcasting style is unique and leans heavily into using tools and infused objects as magical focuses. Waving lockpicks around while casting spells remains objectively funny. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Blades in the Dark is a game about daring criminals pulling off impossible heists. Our crew immediately used fire to escape the box we voluntarily hid in, assaulted two undercover cops, locked them inside our escape crate, stole accounting records, accidentally got high during evidence collection, and somehow convinced ourselves this was still a stealth mission. Honestly, I think the cult is thriving. Show Notes Part 3 finally dropped us into our first real score and the sewer cult wasted absolutely no time proving they were both competent and deeply concerning. Tasked with infiltrating an illegal leviathan blood refinery hidden beneath an apothecary, we chose the most sensible plan imaginable: smuggle ourselves inside in a supply crate. Naturally this immediately turned into an emergency fire escape situation because Talon solved confinement with alchemy and arson. Once inside, things somehow became more chaotic. We discovered the "guards" were actually Bluecoats running security for the operation, meaning our weird little cult had accidentally punched local law enforcement in the face before the score even properly started. Rather than murder them and summon ghost problems, we tied them up, stuffed them back into the crate, and continued the mission like this was all part of the plan. It absolutely was not. The score also gave us a chance to see Blades in the Dark really shine mechanically. Flashbacks let us retroactively prepare, clocks tracked rising danger, and the system constantly pushed us forward instead of letting us stall in planning mode. Every success created new problems and every problem somehow made the story better. Meanwhile Talon uncovered suspicious ledgers pointing to illicit operations while Roper discovered the drugs in the least scientific way possible by accidentally inhaling them and immediately becoming evidence. It was a perfect demonstration of why this game works so well. The mechanics encourage momentum, but the players create the disasters. By the end we had stolen evidence, infiltrated the operation, mildly traumatized two cops, and learned an important lesson. Never let the ghost guy do quality control on contraband. Key Takeaways The crew's first score involved infiltrating an illegal leviathan blood refinery hidden beneath an apothecary Smuggling themselves inside in supply crates immediately escalated into improvised arson Talon used alchemy and fire to escape confinement and start the mission The refinery operation appeared connected to illicit drug production The guards turned out to be Bluecoats acting as security for the site Killing enemies in Doskvol creates major problems because ghosts are very real Flashbacks allowed retroactive preparation without lengthy planning sessions Clocks helped track danger, progress, and rising alert levels Talon recovered ledgers that may contain coded evidence of illegal activity Roper accidentally sampled the contraband and became mildly intoxicated during evidence collection The score highlighted how Blades in the Dark rewards momentum over perfect planning The cult continues to be alarmingly effective despite having absolutely no business succeeding Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati