I have a little table tool that I use for every single session. It helps me track time, encounters, and gives me enough room that I can take whatever notes I want.
Here it is. I use the blank space next to the initiative box for marking hit points, effects, etc.
I keep the sheets in a binder and it makes it really easy to remember past sessions.
In-between Bastweald and the Smolder Scrub are the dangerous waters of the Bay of Lost Souls. Here dark waves hold the faces of the long dead.
This is not a friendly region. A drowned and corrupted celestial lairs in ruins at the north end of the bay, and shipwrecks dot the northwest coast. Elsewhere, an ancient aboleth gathers history and lost knowledge in a deep underwater crevice.
I had fallen a bit behind in posting my #Dungeon23 updates, but only because I was doing so much prep for the Holy Rollers retreat! Now that the retreat is over and I’ve had a bit of time to get back into things, I hope to catch up and share the regions I’ve been developing.
Across the Bay of Lost Souls from my week 1 region of The Bastweald is an area called Smolder Scrub. This 26mile x 18mile region was blasted by a large eruption from the nearby volcano, Grandpa Snurre, around 20 years ago. Thick ash fell across the region, killing nearly all the trees and plant life. The ground remains overly soft and difficult to travel upon, but plant life has returned. Dense scrub of variegated colors has sprouted up everywhere and proper trails are all but lost. Between volcanic smoke, moisture from the bay, and dirt kicked up by passing creatures, a persistent gray haze plagues the Smolder Scrub, lightly obscuring the terrain and reducing visibility to just 1 mile.
It’s a rough land but hides multiple secrets. An old military outpost was lost after being buried by the explosion and was said to be a storehouse for multiple magical armaments. Also a young halfling has a dark secret in the village of the Scrubfellows.
Week 1 of #Marches23 #Dungeon23 is complete!
The Bastweald is an ancient forest that guards a powerful secret. Full region description, inhabitants, dungeon, legendary monster & lair, loot, and random encounter table all done!
It is less than one month away from the start of the Holy Rollers Retreat, and there are only TWO SPOTS LEFT before we hit our absolute maximum capacity! Single or double room available. Today is your last chance to register with our deep New Year’s discount – 23% off for 2023!
The 2023 Holy Rollers Retreat will be held Jan 31 – Feb 3rd at the ARC Retreat Community, about an hour north of the Twin Cities. In a homelike atmosphere, ARC offers 90 acres of pristine wetlands and woodlands within a majestic white pine forest. Trails are available for walking, skiing, and snowshoeing, as is a labyrinth for walking meditation.
This retreat will provide attendees with a wonderful mix of gaming, learning, and rest.
Each day will afford hours of Dungeons & Dragons play, with daily game sessions run by four seasoned DMs. The whole experience will be that of a collective West Marches campaign, and will lean heavily into exploration, discovery, and emergent storytelling.
Within each day, opportunities will be offered to explore the history of the ups and the downs between the gaming community and the church, as well as exploring emergent ways that people of faith are forming themselves for the work of God today. A highlight will be a screening of the GenCon-award-winning documentary The Satanic Panic and the Religious Battle for the Imagination and follow up conversation with the featured Pastor Derek White, aka The Geek Preacher.
The ARC Retreat Community offers a quiet place to slow down the pace of life, restore balance, and grow on your spiritual journey. Enjoy healthy and delicious meals prepared and served from the ARC kitchen. Cozy up by the fireplace or strap on snowshoes and explore the 90 acres of pristine wetlands and woodlands within a majestic white pine forest, located in Stanchfield, MN, about an hour north of the MSP Airport.
For years I’ve been using a simple, yet key, tool in my GM campaign binder, a time tracker developed by olddungeonmaster.com:
DM Tool for Tracking Time Download your free copy here. I have tried several different ways to keep track of time in a dungeon. Years ago I even wrote a “Time Tender” software program. I was thinking of getting a toy clock, or a broken clock that I could turn the hands on. Thinking of […]D&D 5E – TIME TRACKING TOOL
It’s well designed and simple enough to do what I need without getting in the way. It’s quick and efficient and I love being able to shade in the little boxes. There’s tons of space for adding notes about anything else I deem to be relevant.
Keeping track of time improved my game in all sorts of ways, but as I’ve gotten more into West Marches style play I’ve found myself wanting a few small updates to this tracking tool.
First, I wanted an easier way to visually mark the 4hr divisions of the day’s watches, a sort of exploration turn used for overland travel, foraging, hunting, surveying, and other non-combat adventuring tasks. I changed the numeration around the outside of the tracker to better call out these 4hr chunks of time.
Second, I wanted a reminder to track the weather. Weather in ttrpgs is often either forgotten about entirely or used primarily as a plot device. In exploration heavy play the weather can become a key challenge for the party to overcome. Many GMs will randomly generate the weather either in the moment or ahead of time, and this puts that note on the weather in an easy to reference spot – right in the middle.
I enjoy using it so much I wanted to share this tool with others. Download the PDF and never not know what time it is again!
In 2023 I’m diving into the #dungeon23 design challenge, a challenge to do just a bit of game design each day of the year and have a huge body of work at the end of the year. Since I’m exploring West Marches-style design lately, I’m going to take this challenge in a West Marches direction and I’m calling it #marches23.
Each week of the year I’ll focus on designing 1 region. Regions are complex areas with a lot of design bits, kind of like a group of thematically connected rooms in a dungeon. Each day I’ll work on designing a small part of the region I’m working on. I’ll start a new region every Sunday and will post the finished region here on my blog each Saturday. Daily updates will be posted on Mastodon (https://dice.camp/@TheDMPastor)
Here’s the overall map that I will be filling in with 52 regions over the course of 2023.
We’ll set out from the town of Bastion to see what we can see.
We are exactly one month away from the start of the Holy Rollers Retreat. As of writing, there are only a few spots left (4!). To celebrate the new year and make this retreat as accessible as we can financially, we’re offering a last chance deal with a deep discount – 23% off for 2023!
The 2023 Holy Rollers Retreat will be held Jan 31 – Feb 3rd at the ARC Retreat Community, about an hour north of the Twin Cities. In a homelike atmosphere, ARC offers 90 acres of pristine wetlands and woodlands within a majestic white pine forest. Trails are available for walking, skiing, and snowshoeing, as is a labyrinth for walking meditation.
This retreat will provide attendees with a wonderful mix of gaming, learning, and rest.
Each day will afford hours of Dungeons & Dragons play, with daily game sessions run by four seasoned DMs. The whole experience will be that of a collective West Marches campaign, and will lean heavily into exploration, discovery, and emergent storytelling.
Within each day, opportunities will be offered to explore the history of the ups and the downs between the gaming community and the church, as well as exploring emergent ways that people of faith are forming themselves for the work of God today. A highlight will be a screening of the GenCon-award-winning documentary The Satanic Panic and the Religious Battle for the Imagination and follow up conversation with the featured Pastor Derek White, aka The Geek Preacher.
The ARC Retreat Community offers a quiet place to slow down the pace of life, restore balance, and grow on your spiritual journey. Enjoy healthy and delicious meals prepared and served from the ARC kitchen. Cozy up by the fireplace or strap on snowshoes and explore the 90 acres of pristine wetlands and woodlands within a majestic white pine forest, located in Stanchfield, MN, about an hour north of the MSP Airport.
Here on the Dungeon Master Pastor website my tagline is that this is “Where following Jesus and fighting dragons meet.” Fighting dragons at the Dungeons and Dragons table helps people to learn that the challenges are possible to overcome, but following Jesus is what helps me know that that’s not just a fantasy. Following Jesus has taught me that the challenges in our life are real, and that they can be overcome through faith.
Four years ago when my son was born he was diagnosed on the newborn screening with a disease called spinal muscular atrophy. It’s a devastating disease, one that treatments were just coming out for and were still experimental. In some ways the treatments my son received still are experimental and it remains unknown how long they will work to keep this disease at bay. SMA is a disease that that takes lives and threatened to take the life of my son.
In addition to that, in recent years a close family member of mine became overwhelmed by the stress of life and developed a severe bipolar disorder. Over the last few years, they have been hospitalized half a dozen times, up for months at a time.
It has been an extremely challenging time in my family’s life, but through my faith I know that it is also possible to overcome these challenges and get through this hard stuff. Not only that, but faith gives me an understanding that circumstances like these are not judgment. They are not a reason to lose hope. Instead, faith gives me the very hope I need to persevere and not lose myself in the midst of all this.
My faith in Jesus has really carried me through and shown me that yes, the real life dragons – those like disease and mental illness – you can overcome them. You can face the challenges and come out on the other side with your spirit and soul intact. And not only can you face them and endure them, but you can discover immense beauty and joy in life at the same time.
I have a theology of joy and a love for play. Often in the seriousness of everything that faces us in life, we can lose sight of freedom, joy, and fun. But the joy of Jesus shows me that yes, there is a way to hold onto the seriousness of the world’s problems, but also to do that without forgetting that we are ultimately liberated and set free through Christ from ever being defined by them.
Dragon+, the official digital magazine of Dungeons & Dragons, was recently shuttered. I'm reposting here an article in which I was featured from back in 2019. I've added updates to dates and names in [brackets].
In 2018 Dungeons & Dragons participated in its sixth consecutive year with the Extra Life charity, benefiting the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. With huge appreciation to our entire community, we raised over $200k—and as thanks to our generous donors, D&D Team members offered a series of rewards. These included Q&A discussions within Dragon+, which we are pleased to continue this issue with Rory Philstrom. We thank Rory for his support—and on behalf of the D&D Team, we look forward to taking part in Extra Life 2019! [Current D&D Extra Life Team Page]
I’ve donated to Extra Life in the past, but 2018 was even more meaningful because of the recent birth of my son, Edan. He was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a rare genetic disease. Thankfully, it was caught on a newborn screening and we’ve been able to get some pretty amazing treatment from a local hospital, which is one of the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals that Extra Life raises money for. I know from personal experience that these hospitals do lifesaving work. There’s more to gaming than just having fun—it can be a powerful way to bring people together to do real good in the world.
I first played Dungeons & Dragons in elementary school. One of my first forays was through the TSR RPG/board game Dragon Strike. Soon after that my grandmother gifted me the 1991 black box version of D&D, which was a great intro to the game as it included a card-by-card solo adventure that gradually taught me the rules as I escaped from Zanzer’s Dungeon. Between that and the cheesy Dragon Strike instructional video, I learned quickly. I probably played the D&D solo adventure a half-dozen times when I couldn’t convince my family or friends to join me, and I always had a blast.
I finally got something of a group together in Latchkey, a before-and-after school childcare program I attended. At that point I didn’t really have any conception of what a campaign was. At most, we strung two or three sessions together in a continuous story. I’d stuff one of those big game boxes in my backpack, set it up and then cajole whomever I could to play with me and we would get as far as we got in the 45 minutes or so of free time that we had.
As I got older, I never found a group of friends that was interested in playing so the game itself fell by the wayside, although I did have a well-thumbed Monster Manual, a growing collection of pewter miniatures and I read every Dragonlance book I could get my hands on. I always enjoyed D&D and had consistently been looking for a way to get back into it. Who knew it would come through the church?
I’m now a Lutheran minister and it was some of my fellow pastors who gave me a way back into playing D&D. We were hanging out at a church conference, discussing the McElroy brothers’ podcast The Adventure Zone. I had never heard of the podcast but some of them were following it pretty closely. I perked up when I heard the brothers were playing Dungeons & Dragons. One of my friends said, “We need to find someone who knows how to play this game. I want to play!” Sheepishly I answered, “I used to play. I could teach you.”
“Playing as a pastor is interesting. I’ve discovered a lot of crossover in the skills it takes to be a good Dungeon Master and in the skills it takes to be a good pastor.”
-Pastor Rory Philstrom
That was three and half years ago [2015]. Since then I’ve been DMing for over a dozen of us playing in a campaign that has now had its final session. The game grew so big I had to split it into two groups! The two parties alternated weeks as I ran them through a conjoined storyline in a homebrew world. It was fun because the actions of one group impacted what was going on in the other story. For the final session I brought them all back together and we had a massive twelve-person game.
Playing as a pastor is interesting. I’ve discovered a lot of crossover in the skills it takes to be a good Dungeon Master and in the skills it takes to be a good pastor. Both are better when you have the ability to understand people’s stories in a deeper way. Expressing empathy is a huge part of faith and an important skill which everybody could afford to develop. Part of a pastor’s role is managing groups of people while also caring for that community—good Dungeon Masters also need to play that role of shepherd at the table, trying to make sure that the game functions and moves forward and also that everyone’s having a good experience. It’s an interesting overlap.
What’s also been interesting is interacting with the online community for D&D. When people find out I’m a pastor their response can be, “What are pastors doing playing this game?” Many people lived through a time when the game was demonized by Christian clergy so they think it is unusual to find us playing it. As a pastor who plays D&D I want to say, “It’s my game too! I’ve been playing it for a long time.” This game is for everybody, it doesn’t matter who you are.
I’ve never heard a negative response from my faith community. I talk openly about the game, use it as a teaching tool, and have recently started running the Adventurers League at my church. No-one asks, “What is our pastor doing playing D&D?” The most common response I get is, “Can I play?”
Being a Christian, a pastor, and someone who loves Dungeons & Dragons, I’ve tried to “speak” to that space. I blog at DungeonMasterPastor.com about the overlap between life, D&D and the ministry. I have tried to explain how this game can help us think more deeply about not just the characters we play, but about our own character and the way we live in our own stories. The blog has been a great outlet for those thoughts. It’s really my way of trying to demystify both the Christian community for D&D players that might not have a lot of interaction with it, and demystify the D&D community for Christians who might otherwise be denied a true interaction with it. I try and speak to the promise that each of those parts have, and show how they can engage with one another, as both of those communities have something to offer each other. It’s been a fun and interesting topic to explore.
The group of pastors who play weekly were originally all based in Western North Dakota. In that region you’re spread out and it’s tough to find people to hang out with, let alone play a game. Using Roll20 we were able to play our weekly game online. Since then we’ve all mostly moved out of North Dakota and are living elsewhere: I’m now in Minnesota, while others have found themselves in Wisconsin, New Mexico, and Ohio.
There was still a desire to play in person because there’s a different kind of magic when you are face-to-face around a table. So in 2018 I organized our first summer retreat so a bunch of us could get together and play. Not everyone from our group could make it though, and I thought, “What if I open this up and see if other people are interested?” From there it morphed into a D&D continuing education retreat for ministers and it went so well that we’re doing it again this year. [The retreat continues still, now called Holy Rollers!]
Thirteen of us came together in 2018, culminating with a final adventure around a huge table where everybody was playing 20th level characters. With a large group at that level I didn’t think even throwing a tarrasque at them would be a significant enough challenge. They were so powerful I had them face Tiamat and had to add a couple extra heads, so it was a seven-headed version instead of five!
The two extra heads were a shadow dragon head with its necrotic breath weapon and a sea dragon head (from Tome of Beasts) with its tidal breath weapon. In ancient near eastern mythos the classic enemy is the sea dragon, representing chaos. The Babylonian creation myth involves the hero/storm god Marduk slaying that dragon and turning its dead body into the creation. That dragon’s name… was Tiamat.
One of the things I’ve learned in all this is that playing Dungeons & Dragons is a really great way to help people access the stories and characters from scripture. I’ve used it as a tool in this way in my middle-school Confirmation classes. It really helps to grab the students’ attention and engage their imaginations.
To start, everyone picks a person from the portion of The Bible we are studying and rolls them up as a D&D character. Then I throw them all together in a party, drop them into a particular biblical story, and turn it into a little adventure. D&D is something that has been fun to work with because you’re teaching kids and adults in an interactive way.
There are certain classic spiritual methods that are usually practiced alone—such as the Ignatian exercises in the Catholic tradition—which use a mix of meditation, prayer, and imaginative contemplation to help people deepen their spirituality. The exercise is to take a passage of scripture and use your imagination to place yourself within it, walking around and interacting with the people. Roleplaying games offer a way to take this solo practice and do it collectively, which has the potential to provide a richer experience. Participating in this as a community, you also learn to listen to, support, and understand one another. Imagination is one of God’s gifts to us, and it’s great to exercise that gift using play.
Gaming is a neat way to bring people together and build community, for no other purpose than simply hanging out and paying attention to the relationships you’re building around the table. When you can bring people together for an even greater good, as Extra Life has been able to do by helping people raise money for the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, it turns into an even more powerful thing.
Playing D&D can help you grow as a person as your imagination becomes more engaged and complex, and you’re able to hold new things in mind. How we imagine impacts how we act in the world because when we don’t know something, our imaginations fill in the gaps. We can plug those gaps with simple stereotypes, clichés, and prejudices—or we can open ourselves up to new possibilities and wonder.
Right now the world needs a more complex imagination about how we perceive one another as people. It’s important to be able to look at everyone in the world and see people with unique backstories, abilities and powers—there are no cardboard NPCs. There’s real joy in finding out these stories about one another. Being curious about each other and being willing to share in one another’s stories is one of the first steps in loving one another.
Pastor Rory Philstrom runs the Pastors & Dragons Retreat [now the Holy Rollers Retreat] for clergy and people of faith and the second annual event takes place at the Mount Olivet Conference Center in Farmington, MN on August 6-9, 2019. [Our next retreat will be at ARC Retreat Center in Minnesota on Jan 31-Feb 3, 2023.] He lives in Minnesota with his wife Carolyn (who is also a pastor) and his son Edan [and now also our daughter Josephine].
Dungeon Master Pastor 