Give Your RPGs The Scent Of Adventure...

If you're a fan of RPGs, odds are you would be all for a product that makes the gaming experience more immersive. That said, you can only get so immersive unless you have a dragon cave or old timey tavern close by.

Here's where Adventure Scents can come in handy. Adventure Scents makes 40 different types of oil-based scent beads that are then packaged in sold in tins, sachets or loose in zipper bags. They even have wearable scent lockets.

The scents are wide-ranging, so whether you're playing a game based on a book, a movie, a TV series, or a video game, odds are there is a scent that can be used to enhance the experience. Personally, I like the idea that you can transport yourself from a Japanese Teahouse, to a Roman Bathhouse, to a Science Lab, to a Barren Moon all with smells.

D&D yoga...

World Premier, Brooklyn, NY, January 25, 2014

swi in collaboration with Sarah Dahnke and Eric Hagan

Round 2

Austin, Texas

March 8, 2014 during SXSW

swi in collaboration with Samantha Calvano and Brandon Hodge

D&D Yoga can be played in many ways. The varying flavors range from that of a guided narrative while people do yoga to a far more interactive experience where players are in conversation and play a more active role in the campaign. For the first trial, we thought it would be wise to veer closer to the guided narrative side of things. Players still made decisions and rolled dice to dictate a few directions that the story took but generally we wanted to see how the experiment would play out and then build from there. As we proceed into future events we are building more interactivity into the game.

For the premier in Brooklyn players occupied a single character. This maintained the togetherness that yoga classes offer as participants are following a guide each doing the same move. Further, embodying one character in the story simplified the identity in the D&D narrative. We talked a lot about how everyone would be their own characters and how that would work. And we might expriment with that in the future. But again, for the first experiment we wanted to test a baseline flavor of this mashup and then build from there. We used D10's (ten sided dice) to simplify the summations but this is somethng we will also continue to experiment with.

For Round 2 in Austin, we took what we learned from Brooklyn and made some tweaks. There were two yoga leads and when battle happened half the class embodied the opponent so the divided class fought each other. We used the more iconic D20 dice and there was a conscious effort to keep the whole thing light and fun. Brandon's character sheet that each player received was more involved and the adventure was inspired by an early D&D classic from his childhood, The Wooden Mouse by Roger Smith. Samantha created several new poses, a few favorites were Spell Pose and Potion Pose. Pose chart and audio from the Austin Session, here.

Suggestions for play:

Of course feel free to adopt the D&D Yoga postiions shared here, but find a yoga lead who is willing to learn and create new moves on the fly, someone who will enjoy it. Likewise, the Dungeon Master needs to be flexible in their approach as they will be compromising aspects of D&D that may seem sacreligious. Get those 2 people in the room together and hash out how you want to run the game. Then find someone to test your approach, make necessary improvements, and then find your party!

Round 3

Back in Brooklyn

March 22, 2014

swi in collaboration with Sarah Dahnke and Luke Crane

Every player had an indivualized character sheet as Luke and Sarah moved us through his adventure titled "Aeglaekir and the Tree of Ythunn." Through a forest, successfully parlayed with a troll, stumbled up a cliff, clumsily passed an ancient wall, evaded an angry cult, entered an abandoned dwarf dwelling in a mountain where we were of course confronted by not one but two...dragons. It took some lucky dice to sucessfully utilize a spell on the dragons and in the end, immersed within the refreshingly physiological workout led by Sarah, we all received one apple of youth from the Tree of Ythunn. Here are a few pics:

prolific maps...

Dyson Logos's account is an endlessly scrolling inventory of hand-drawn D&D maps, each one cooler than the last.

Logos accompanies his maps with detailed notes about his inspirations, creative process, and the games that result from them. A separate site lets you see the adventures that accompany the maps.

He runs a Patreon, where patrons can fund his ongoing work and free releases of his maps for commercial and noncommercial work.

Crypts and Sewers: "While the left hand set of catacombs is rougher and is used exclusively for the burial of the deceased, the structures in the right-side catacombs are much better maintained and involve a lot of heavy masonry work – implying that the church above uses it for more than just a burial site (in fact, assuming that most of the doors are locked, it would appear that they bury very few people down here, having only a few crypts directly attached to their chambers and passages)."

Finished the little tomb.

The Stone Sinister.

The City of Letath: "The first of these cities to get finished is Letath, a small coastal city that the party travelled to and then left within 20 minutes of game play. Basically enough time for me to throw down the map on the table and then fast forward through them negotiating a fair place to teach the young chiefling they were escorting, and then to head north to their true destination of Winterspire."

Dyson's Maps & Cartography [Dyson Logos]

[+]

The great 1980s Dungeons & Dragons panic...

In an era of potent concern over internet pornography, cyber-bullying, and drugs, it is hard to imagine a game being controversial. But 30 years ago Dungeons & Dragons was the subject of a full-on moral panic, writes Peter Ray Allison. At the beginning of 1982's ET, a group of teenage boys are indulging in a roleplay game, featuring dice and spells, and sounding a lot like Dungeons & Dragons. They indulge in banter as they wait for a pizza delivery to arrive. This innocuous depiction was a far cry from the less-neutral coverage that was to come. Back in 1974, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) was arguably the first true roleplaying game. Players took on the mantle of adventurers from a multitude of races and occupations. Each game had a Dungeon Master who would act as both a referee and storyteller. By 2004, it was estimated that the game had been played by over 20 million people. Today, any veteran player from the game's early years would speak of its positive attributes. It was based almost entirely in the imagination. It was social. No screens were involved. But in the 1980s the game came under an extraordinary sustained assault from fundamentalist religious groups who feared its power over young minds. In 1979, 16-year-old child prodigy James Dallas Egbert III disappeared from his room at Michigan State University. A private investigator, William Dear, was hired by James's parents to find their son. Despite apparently knowing little about roleplaying games, Dear believed that D&D was the cause of Egbert's disappearance. In truth, Egbert suffered from, among other things, depression and drug addiction, and had gone into hiding - in the utility tunnels under the university - during an episode of self-harm. The well-publicised episode - referred to as the Steam Tunnel Incident - prompted a number of works of fiction, including the novel Mazes and Monsters and 1982 Tom Hanks film of the same name.

Dungeons & Dragons

Egbert later died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1980. Despite the evidence regarding his mental health problems, some activists believed Egbert's suicide was caused by D&D. In 1982, high school student Irving Lee Pulling died after shooting himself in the chest. Despite an article in the Washington Post at the time commenting "how [Pulling] had trouble 'fitting in'", mother Patricia Pulling believed her son's suicide was caused by him playing D&D. Again, it was clear that more complex psychological factors were at play. Victoria Rockecharlie, a classmate of Irving Pulling, commented that "he had a lot of problems anyway that weren't associated with the game". At first, Patricia Pulling attempted to sue her son's high school principal, claiming the curse placed upon her son's character during a game run by the principal was real. She also sued TSR Inc, the publishers of D&D. Despite the court dismissing these cases, Pulling continued her campaign by forming Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (BADD) in 1983. Pulling described D&D as "a fantasy role-playing game which uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, satanic type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination and other teachings". Pulling and BADD launched an intensive media campaign through conservative Christian outlets as well as mainstream media, including an appearance on current affairs show 60 Minutes opposite D&D co-creator Gary Gygax. Image caption Jeremy Irons in the film version of Dungeons & Dragons, 2000 In 1985, Jon Quigley, of the Lakeview Full Gospel Fellowship, spoke for many opponents when he claimed: "The game is an occult tool that opens up young people to influence or possession by demons." These fears also found their way into the UK. Fantasy author KT Davies recalls "showing a vicar a gaming figure - he likened D&D to demon worship because there were 'gods' in the game". Veteran roleplayer Andy Smith found himself in the unusual position of being both a roleplayer and a Christian. "While working for a Christian organisation I was told to remove my roleplaying books from the shared accommodation as they were offensive to some of the other workers and contained references to demon-worship." Looking back now, it's possible to see the tendrils of a classic moral panic, and some elements of the slightly esoteric world of roleplaying did stir the imaginations of panicked outsiders.

How to play

"Since fantasy typically features activities like magic and witchcraft, D&D was perceived to be in direct opposition to biblical precepts and established thinking about witchcraft and magic," says Dr David Waldron, lecturer in history and anthropology at Federation University Australia and author of Roleplaying Games and the Christian Right: Community Formation in Response to a Moral Panic. "There was also a view that youth had an inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality." While the wilder claims about the nature of D&D tended to emanate from evangelical groups, they prompted wider suspicion. "The memes from this campaign proliferated and, being published largely uncritically in the initial stages, led to a wide-ranging list of bizarre claims," says Waldron. "For example, that when a character died you were also likely to commit suicide." The claims being made about roleplaying games did not go unchallenged. Author Michael Stackpole was a vocal dissenter, criticising Patricia Pulling and BADD. In 1990, Stackpole published The Pulling Report, in which he documented numerous errors made by BADD and accused Pulling of misrepresenting her credentials as an expert witness on games. Studies by the American Association of Suicidology, the US Centers for Disease Control, and Health and Welfare Canada all found no causal link between D&D and suicide. D&D continues to be debated, in the US at least. In 2010, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld a ban on D&D by the Waupun Correctional Institution. Captain Muraski, the institution's gang specialist, testified that D&D can "foster an inmate's obsession with escaping from the real life, correctional environment, fostering hostility, violence and escape behaviour". But public perception has changed. If people have any kind of negative view of roleplaying today, it is much more likely to be about the supposed geekish overtones, rather than fears for the sanity of the players. The students who played D&D in the 1980s are now grown up into respectable careers. "The view of roleplaying games has changed over time," says Smith, "mostly because the predicted 'streets awash with the blood of innocents as a horde of demonically-possessed roleplayers laid waste to the country' simply never materialised." [+]

Give Your RPGs The Scent Of Adventure...

If you're a fan of RPGs, odds are you would be all for a product that makes the gaming experience more immersive. That said, you can only get so immersive unless you have a dragon cave or old timey tavern close by. Here's where Adventure Scents can come in handy. Adventure Scents makes 40 different types of oil-based scent beads that are then packaged in sold in tins, sachets or loose in zipper bags. They even have wearable scent lockets. The scents are wide-ranging, so whether you're playing a game based on a book, a movie, a TV series, or a video game, odds are there is a scent that can be used to enhance the experience. Personally, I like the idea that you can transport yourself from a Japanese Teahouse, to a Roman Bathhouse, to a Science Lab, to a Barren Moon all with smells. [+] [+] [+]

first of all, you're being a total dick right now...

basic set legos...

ear wax...

Baptist pastor Win Worley preaches against popular roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, and prays to free his congregation from occult demons.

3D printed thorn dice...

awesome prep work team!

d20 ice mold...