If you only want to be made aware of things like BIG PROJECT announcements, convention appearances, or sales on my webstore I would recommend subscribing to my EMAIL LIST (It’s at the bottom of my landing page) but ultimately the Patreon will get you EVERYTHING.

I’ll leave this blog up because I can’t be bothered to transfer everything.

The first "session" for the comic is done! Which means that I can talk a little about playing that first session, what I learned and what I've started doing since then.

First off. The process of recapping a solo delve as a comic was very fun! I am very bad at "story structure" and am much better of reading between the lines. For me this was a perfect setup. It had me thinking a lot about things like "narrative" in RPGs.

This game was played almost entirely with the free SRD of OSE. I kept it very barebones and really only worried about the mechanical aspects of dungeon crawling. I followed the rules and procedures of the game and then reverse engineered the story from that. I know there's a lot of people that don't really think you can have a "narrative" TTRPG experience in a dungeon crawl, but I disagree. It's just a very specific type of story. It's a story about people doing their best in a weird line of work. People trying to scrape by but also seeking thrills. Gambling with their lives in hopes of hitting it big and often times falling down hard.

I like playing games in that style because it reminds me of working in the service industry in my 20s. It reminds me of catering jobs where you're flying by the seat of your pants because half the staff called out sick. It reminds me of meeting cool people and then losing touch because they move away or quit or die. It reminds me of going out for drinks after terrible shifts and bonding with people you wouldn’t have any other reason to hang out with.

Okay. Enough about that, let's talk through some of the interactions in the first session.

There were no encounters on the way to the dungeon. Here's the world map I made using Hexkit and Zeshio’s Tiles:

The first door in the dungeon was locked. Misty spent a full hour attempting to unlock it. Each attempt is 10 minutes and causes a reaction roll, but we were lucky. The party had to rest after all the failed attempts because as per the rules there you need to rest for 1 turn out of the 6 that make up an hour. I imagined this as Misty resting while everyone else stood around annoyed, which didn't make it into the recap but was very funny to me.

The Gnomes were a cool interaction. When the party encountered them I rolled reaction (2d6) and got a 6: Uncertain & Confused. I decided this warrants a reroll if you can justify it, and decided that they would try and give the Gnomes food. I rolled 2d6 again and it came up 12: Enthusiastic Friendship. So, Gnomes like snacks, and are our friends now. I probably should have attempted to recruit them at this point but I wasn't really thinking in those terms yet.

The next door was stuck so I rolled my unstick the door check (d6) twice, for both the Dwarf and the Fighter since they were both trying. They both failed and the failure triggered a wandering monster roll, which came up as Stirges! I decided they were sleeping in the walls and we had awakened them. Combat played out pretty much exactly as I drew it. Iris died, and the Fighter knocked out (he rolled a critical miss and my table for that said he hurt himself for 3 damage. This would have killed him but I decided that you cant accidentally murder yourself and that he was knocked out at 1 HP) perhaps I am too soft on myself but I suppose that’s the bonus of being your own DM. Who got attacked by monsters was all determined randomly because I figured Stirges wouldn't have a favored target.

With 2 party members down I decided that retreat was the only good option (especially if I was ruling that the fighter didn’t die, it felt like he needed to be brought back to town to avoid death) so I had the party pack up the Stirge corpses in hope that they would be useful for someone in town and we could make some amount of money.

There was 1 wandering monster on the way out of the dungeon, a Trader who was confused per the reaction table. I'll be honest I completely forgot about this when sketching my comic out so there's no pages about it. I decided that the Trader had gotten lost in the dungeon and lost his mind. Perhaps I'll add a page to the final version of the comic for this, I meet this trader again in a later delve and it would be good foreshadowing.

After leaving the dungeon we had not wandering monster rolls on the way back to  town. I spent some time looking through Hamud's Harvesting Handbook for what Stirge parts would go for and they did NOT fetch much. I'm still working on a procedure for selling "non treasure items" like monster parts, weird objects etc so I've been poking around in various tomes to figure out the best way of going about it. With no money and a 4 day cap on resurrection based on the level of Cleric that resided in the Keep I wasn't going to be able to bring the Elf back to life. I decided instead that she would be properly buried, and in turn decided that within the lawful church of Bahamut that would mean the corpse being ritually burned to avoid it coming back as an undead. This would cost 50 gold because Funerals are expensive, but in terms of the gold economy in this game its like 2 grappling hooks so its not impossible.

In terms of the comic I wanted there to be some tension about using the limited funds for this, considering how they had just met the Elf, but Ellis the Cleric being the de-facto leader made it make sense to me. It was a last minute decision to make Iris and Zora friends, but I like the way it played out.

I'm still figuring out how I want to do the second session recap. There's way MORE of that session so I may make the format support that a bit more.

We'll see! Thanks for reading.

This was honestly devastating to draw.

At first I was worried that the stories would be too cute but then I figured that was more of a feature than a bug.

I decided I’m going to call this comic “Delvers” which will undoubtedly be difficult to search and get lost in vast sea of d&d content but oh well it’s a suitable name for now. I’m also going to start calling the individual pages turns because that’s roughly the way that I’ve been breaking down the panel structure. I’m extremely excited about this comic and I can’t wait to post more! My current schedule is a page a day mon-fri but we’ll see how sustainable that is.

Stay tuned!

the second reaction roll was a 12. A bunch of new friends were made. More to come!

Old D&D handles a lot of its “narrative” through reaction rolls. When you encounter something you roll 2d6 and based on the quality of that roll you either end up in a fight or possibly with a new friend. My first roll with the Gnomes was an 8 which was “uncertain, confused” so I figured I would give them a gift to allow myself to make another roll. Find out how it went next time!

In game terms it took the thief a full hour to unlock that door, each attempt is 10 minutes of game time. We went left because some time a long time ago somebody said you should always go left and so that’s how I always do it.

I finally decided to try solo gaming, and I’ll be totally honest it was way more fun than I was expecting. If you aren’t familiar with the concept there has been a trend in the last few years of folks playing full games of D&D (and other ttrpgs) fully by themselves using a variety of tables to generate dungeons as you crawl through them, arbitrating things as you go. Initially I found the idea daunting but after doing some research I decided to try it out. I bought a new notebook, I rolled up some characters and played a game.

Here’s what I’ve been using for everything so far:

Base System: OSE (I mostly use the SRD because its easy to reference on the fly and I have limited desk space for the amount of spreading out this tends to take.

Dungeon Generation: I’ve been using a combination of the AD&D random dungeon tables and the generation tables in Sandbox Generator. The Empty and Special Rooms in this are great especially and it has a bunch of other neat stuff like magic doors.

Resources and Knowledgeable folks:

SoloDungeonCrawler - these videos are great, especially for understanding the ins and outs of 0D&D and Chainmail, I decided to go with basic myself because that’s the system I tend to run and play games in and I was interested in making myself more familiar with the rules but much of the wisdom here carries over and he uses a few different systems in his playthroughs.

Chaoclypse - Seeing Chao post in a discord chat about solo gaming is what got me wanting to try it. Great channel and substack. The linked post has a ton of good advice for getting started!

So far it’s been a lot of fun, I’ll talk more about specific delves after I finish the comic pages for them. I like the idea of making this a series where I discuss how I arrived at various conclusions and how I decided to arbitrate stuff.

In the meantime, happy delving!

I got to make some merchandise for my favorite hamburger spot! The folks that run this place are the absolute best and drawing a burger might be my new favorite thing. I should do more food illustration.

Brian! The Cataclysmic Engine- Okay technically this happened in 2022 but I didn’t PHYSICALLY HOLD a copy of it until 2023 so I’m counting it there. I love this album so much and it feels extremely cool to make art for an album that you love so much. I listened to it the whole time I was drawing the art for it and I still enjoy both looking at and listening to it. You should go buy a copy for yourself or at least stream them because it rules.

Freelancers: A Crossroads Game- So this was in production since 2022 but was actually finished in 2023 and released! This is my first board game project that has been produced on a large scale and it’s extremely cool and I really like playing it. I’ve played 2 of the many available campaigns and I really enjoy it’s sense of humor and laid back nature. It’s a great time for folks who have some familiarity with TTRPGs but also I think accessible enough to play if you don’t. This project was probably the largest I’ve worked on yet- here’s some of my favorite pieces from it:

2023 also had me guesting on Between Two Cairns! After listening to a few episodes I got in touch with them to offer my services as a sticker designer and now I am somehow an occasional guest for talking about old RPG modules. These things just happen. I ended up making a zine about Steading of the Hill Giant Chieftain after we talked about it, here’s a few images from that-

Here’s the sticker (you’ll get one if you subscribe to their patreon)-

Barkeep on the Borderlands won an Ennie! It was very kind of W.F Smith to send all the contributors medals for it, I can officially brag about being an Ennie winner now (I know everyone says they don’t care about the Ennies but as someone who has a medal I now care about them a lot, funny how that works)

I finished my first comic! It was a project that sprung out of the NSFW end of my Patreon (my patreon is currently paused because busy but I’m working on making the rest of the content there into something easier to buy) It’s a steamy story about a couple going on vacation for some much needed relaxation called Island Vacation. I’m currently laying out chapter two, and I’m pretty excited to do more.

I’m trying to expand my print library and the pieces I managed to turn into risographs came out really great I think. I’m already working on more in fact. I’m finally going to continue the b/x character class series that I started a few years ago with the Thief print. Next up is the Cleric!

I managed to actually play some D&D in 2023 as well. Nick over at Underworld Adventurer has been running an amazing megadungeon campaign since 2020 and one of the things I love about it is how many artists play in it and make all sorts of great work about the setting and their characters. Here are a few of my contributions to that-

I have enough work from this now that I think I might try and compile it all into a zine- I want to start putting more things together as one of purchases or downloads, I think its cooler that way and relies less on getting people to subscribe to something or get a new social media app in order to see work that I make. I think having stuff like this bundled together and available to just download might be the way to go (print also but that takes a bit more time and money)

I’m running out of steam because this post became enormous, but I’ll leave you with a few more things I worked on. I’ve been doing a lot of work that I think of as sort of just “worldbuilding” that I use for my home games and like to post on instagram. I think it would be cool to put it all together eventually for a kind of Lore/Setting book, because ultimately that’s the thing I like about the hobby the most. Thanks for looking! Enjoy-

I recently unearthed a box full of old things reaching back into my late teens playing D&D. It’s got everything- maps, character sheets, random sketches, games I was in, games I was running. I’ll do my best to recall as I go down the list.

First up is my literal first ever character I played. Circa 2008, my freshman year of college. Apparently I made it to level 4.

It was another year or so before I played in another campaign, and when I did it was a 3.5 SUPER SPLATBOOK character. The guy that ran this game never wanted to start at lvl 1 and I remember being so annoyed trying to figure out how to make a level 6 character with no 3.5 experience, I have no idea why I was using so many splatbooks, I think I borrowed them from the DM and he wanted to watch me suffer I assume.

Next up is a big map of Krynn. I seem to remember finding “Tales of the Lance” on the side of the road, with these maps and the character cards with all the stat blocks but NO BOOK. These then got folded in during a game purge some years ago I imagine. There are a TON of these cards, basically one for each Dragonlance character, which at the time I knew nothing about so I would use them when I needed NPCs for whatever game I was running. I still really love this map, the colors are great and the hex crawl on the back is such an ode to luxurious TSR mapmaking. 10/10

The next chunk of scrap paper is all from a AD&D 2E campaign I played in for a number of years after college. It was a pretty standard wilderness crawl/dungeon explore style game and I really, really had a great time with it. This was from like, 2013-2017 off and on, so it was a pretty expansive game. First time I actually leveled a character from 1-6 instead of an impatient DM just wanting to start at a higher level. I recommend not skimping on early levels, that’s your backstory. The campaign was referred to as “Suplex That Mummy” after an incident in a crypt. I’ll let you guess what happened.

It’s cool to play a character long enough that your art style changes and develops during the process. I still make Marek in various games now and then, love that guy.

this was part of a much shorter lived “monster game” in which we used some 2e splatbook to make monster characters in a sort of fantasy apocalypse world where humans had all died. The second piece was an early digital rendition of the same character. I have to say it’s kind of painful to post old digital art, my ability to draw on a computer has come a long way.

speaking of old painful art, this is a party of characters that myself, my good friend, and my girlfriend (now wife) in college made. It was a CLASSIC scenario of taking about 3 weeks making a cool party of high level 3.5 characters and we played in that game like 2 times and the DM pissed us off so we parted ways. DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS.

The next strata is a strange assortment of drawings that I pulled out of a sketchbook for some reason, only to stick the pages in this box. I honestly have no idea, but I really like some of these still.

These large, folded in half giant drawing pad pieces were part of a game I ran over Google Plus for some friends back in around 2014ish I want to say? It was my first time building a system, which was a semi success for what I tried to do with it (not publish or anything, just like, play) but the city itself has appeared in many of my games since then in various iterations. It’s called Bethodere, and the name is stolen from a book of Marc Bolan’s poetry called “The Warlock of Love” what a goddamn hero.

I did actually just run the game off of this giant paper, which was very stupid and I would totally do again. Big paper makes every task both easier and harder. The table is never big enough but you finally have enough room for notes.

These are from an era of running Lamentations of the Flame Princess megadungeon style games. The characters were all from 17th century earth exploring a big complex. I really liked having the items on cards despite it being a little clunky. Everything was designed to fit inside the envelope so people wouldn’t lose track of their stuff. It was the first open table game that I ran and it was a blast. Ran for probably 6 months or so?

some variations on characters sheets I was producing at the time. I was sometimes using LoTFP but a lot of the time it was a homebrew between that, 5e and a few other random resources. I was really into putting rules on the sheet and getting as much info as I could into a small space.

this one was for a later megadungeon game that never really took off. A keen eye can probably spot six or seven games worth of influence in this one.

sadly there were no more sheets in this, only the spell specific ones.

I did some googling on this next thing and I guess it’s what the Dragonlance Cards came as a part of before I hacked them up. There’s also a fortune telling card game thing that I think I got rid of at some point. Nice Keith Parkinson art though.

there were a few more things in the box, but nothing of note really. Fun to reminisce on what I’m realizing now is about 15 years in the hobby. I don’t think this box ever had whatever edition of rules cyclopedia in it. I’m sure I grabbed it from a yard sale at some point and it was just full of someone’s old character sheets.

For real the first issue is finally done. This was my first ever comic that I approached like a comic with a script and an outline and everything and it was a wild and fun undertaking.

Buy it HERE

Some thoughts on the process and a preview:

I found a really good rhythm while working on this. Once I had the pages sketched out super roughly it was a page a week for about 4 months? Looking back that is a massive amount of time and it was honestly really enjoyable. I plan on doing more, but without a doubt moving forward it will be in B&W. I think the color looks amazing but hot damn does it add to the draw time. I think if I’m going to keep up with a story I have to work smarter not harder.

I’m happy that I made that mistake though because now I have a FULL COLOR first issue of a 16 page comic to show for it. I really appreciate the Patrons piling on for this, that little boost I get at the end of the month from Patreon always seems to get me out of a financial pickle and I’m really glad that it’s there.

Plan is to make physical copies of this, so stay tuned for that. It’s just really easy to release things digitally and much harder to print them so that generally takes longer :)

If you’re hesitant to pick up and read an 18+ comic let me just say that I made it to be romantic, sweet and funny first. It has sex in it, and it’s very much porn, but I wanted it to be about people that they audience could care about, and not just bodies on a page. Anyway that’s my pitch for the puritans.

Here’s the first 3 pages and if you like it why not toss me a couple of bucks on itch.io to read the rest. If you really want to help out you can go over to Patreon.com/better_legends and sign up for the DUNGEONXDUNGEON tier where I release pages when I finish them, credit my patrons in the books I release and also post lots of other erotic work ALONG WITH all of the benefits you get from being a Better Legends patron, which is where all of my regular fantasy work goes.

Enjoy!

PS. the blog post title credit goes to Gabe Soria.

I make an appearance over on Between Two Cairns this week, and we discuss the classic module AGAINST THE GIANTS. In tandem with this I decided to put together a zine of the sketches I make while reading these modules. So far I just have Issue G1 in digital form, but G2 and G3 are in layout and if folks like them I’ll do some print copies as well. Here’s a little sample! (quick note, if you’re a Patron you have a free download code for this waiting for you!)

Enjoy!

Recommendations 

So if you’re into small press RPG’s (I know you are because you’re reading this) you need to check out Space Penguin Ink- Officially launching today, SPI is the brainchild of Jarret Crader, who is leading a bunch of excellent folks in the indie TTRPG scene. 

Space Penguin Ink

The store is launching with 2 mothership adventures, a Troika adventure, A Mork Borg adventure and a DCC adventure- basically a cross section of the most fun indie ttrpg games around. For those of you who don't know, Jarret used to be the project manager at Exalted Funeral, and he has more or less been responsible for some aspect of almost every cool book in RPG land for the last 10 years or so.

Another quick recommendation- If you enjoy the Palace of the Silver Princess, you may be interested to check out this reorganization of it for Cairn done by David Blandy & Richard Markert. It’s a solid way to enjoy a classic adventure that does a few things I especially like-

-Leans into the Zelda-like setting (in a few ways I hadn’t even considered)

-prunes the blocks of texts into highly parseable language for the table

-Combines some of the best aspects of both the orange and green covers to create a better overall story 

-understands the importance of Travis

Consider picking it up and tossing them a few bucks.

Palace of the Silver Princess Cairn Edition

Some Project Updates:

I’m still accepting commission requests for my BIG CHARACTER COMMISSION SALE, and I think I will be until the end of the month or so. My car shit the bed the other day and I’m still waiting to hear back as to the extent of the repair costs (which may be great enough that it might be time to put the old girl to bed and get something new). Either way I’ll be needing some extra cash. The deal is still:

$75 USD ($70 for current Patreon subs) for a character commission (doesn’t have to be an rpg character per say, I’m currently working on a piece memorializing someones old Dark Age of Camelot character- so sick)

If you’re interested you can shoot me an email at Sdmameli@gmail.com

The first issue of Better Legends Friends & Foes is trucking along, we have reached the point where I have to write things and those familiar with my process will know that is the SLOW part of any project for me. But I predict it will be done soon and available for free to patrons and for a small cost to everyone else. This will be digital only for now, as I think I’ll wait until I’ve done a few issues before I combine them into something physical.

The first chapter of my 18+ erotic adventure comic, Island Vacation is nearly done as well! The last page of the first chapter is being posted for my Patrons today and the full version should be ready for general consumption in not that long (hopefully even physical copies of that one!) if you’re interested in any of my NSFW stuff, you can find it over on my Patreon at the $10 tier.

Dungeon23

I am struggling. I think the six month mark may be the last of this project, but that is not set in stone. I have gotten farther than I have with any daily practice project that I’ve done before, which I am extremely proud of. We’ll see what the next few weeks hold and if I manage to dig myself out of a 10 or 11 day idea drought. It would really be something to end it on this:

That's all for now! Thanks for reading.

-Skullboy (Sam)

There could probably be more explanations about characters and names and stuff, but if you want more of this world, just check out the play reports that Nick writes on the blog.

Enjoy!

A quick post before I head into the mountains and bid the internet farewell for a whole 7 days. Thank the lord.