UNAPPRECIATED DUNGEON MASTERS!

If you've ever finished a session and your players gave you a half hearted "yeah, that was great," rather than the reaction you expected, then you're going to want to hear this.

I'm not going to sell you anything. If anything, I'm going to give you the most powerful one shots I've ever encountered for FREE.

Before I do, you'll want to hear exactly how I encountered them in the first place. It'll sound completely unbelievable! I know, I hardly believed it when it happened to me.

So here's why Dungeon Masters and Master Players alike are putting these one shots, each one worthy of a standing ovation, at the top of their inventory and here's how I even found them in the first place.

I've been wandering the country for like 6 months in my old '05 Honda CRV and I've seen some crazy s***. But the craziest s*** I've ever seen came out of the mouth of a man named eloquid Mathers.

Eloquif Mathers lives in a trailer outside of Detroit. He's about 40 years old, he's got crazy white hair and an unkempt beard, and he doesn't touch computers.

I told some people at a little Podunk bar in Dearborn Michigan that I love dungeons and dragons. And they invited me to come watch a game run by Mr Mathers.

I was interested. I love the art form, and they had a really good things to say about it, so I told 'em I'd come along.

The next morning a Saturday morning, I showed up the address they provided. It was deep in a trailer park. I won't tell you exactly where so that nobody can go harass him.

He proceeded to DM the most beautiful story I had ever heard. It was a story about a king who was in charge of a kingdom. This kingdom was the only thing that he knew existed or that anyone knew existed. He had nine sentinels who he gave a piece of his god-like power to prevent this terrifying black miasma from consuming the kingdom.

Three of the nine sentinels betrayed the king and walked off into the miasma. The players were tasked with traversing the miasma, seeking these three sentinels, and killing them to return their power to the king.

The players had a vested interest because if they could successfully re-obtain the godlike power from the sentinels, they had a chance to become sentinels of the king themselves.

I know you know how cool that is. I truly believe that would be a worse spoiler to tell you how this one shot ends then if I told you that Snape kills Dumbledore. I mean I've never heard anything like it. I really wish you were there to see it.

Me and the three players stood up and gave a standing ovation at the end. He took it like he was a freaking emperor. He just took it in.

And then he walked to the fridge, cracked a beer, and said, "everybody out, I'm peaking on 3 grams of penis envies I don't want to see your ugly faces."

I don't know if you ever tried penis envy mushrooms, but the way that these three players reacted to that it was like it was normal. That is not normal. I was shocked.

They told me on the way out that that they don't think he even prepares. It's just gold like that almost every time.

I asked him why he doesn't make a show like Dimention 20 or critical role. They said he hates computers. He won't even let anybody have their phone out at the table. Says he doesn't want anybody to know where he's at, what he thinks, or what he's doing. He says it's better for everybody that way.

I ended up going to two more sessions of his before I had to leave town. Each one was better than the last.

After the third session, I asked if I could talk to him one on one. I told him that his art is so beautiful that the world needs to see it.

I've never seen a grown man look so sad.

He told me that if I was going to sell those three one shots, he would just ask that 10% of all the proceeds go to an organization that helps alcoholics.

I thought on it for a long while. I'm not a great writer so I didn't know if I could capture, especially from memory, the raw essence of Eloquid Mathers.

But I have to try, right? So I got together with a team of Grokbots and did my absolute best.

In exchange for joining my Email list I'll give you those PDFs for free. That's three one shot adventures for dungeons & dragons 2024 inspired by the greatest improvised sessions, run by a crazy old man, drunk and high on mushrooms, that I have ever seen, for FREE.

Even filtered through my unskilled hands, players are regularly BLOWN AWAY when the DM brings these to the table. Eloquid Mathers is THAT good. I wish nothing more than for you to experience that feeling too.

I know what you're thinking. When am I going to start asking you for money? I've been talking about proceeds and all that, after all.

This is literally just to gauge interest in the idea so we can SEE if a crowdfunder that could turn my little Grokbot PDFs into a tangible, skillfully made hardcover book of adventures illustrated by actual artists and balanced by real game designers is a good idea.

If you're down to stick around, it would help a ton because the more people know about it, the more we'll reach people that are excited to contribute when the time comes.

No pressure at all. For real. Join the list at the top of the page, get your free PDFs, and then you can unsubscribe at the bottom of the emails at ANY TIME.

In the meantime, here's how fast you can expect to get exciting results from these adventures, and here's an example of those results:

I ran the Throne of the Hollow King one shot for three people in Salt Lake City. Two were friends of mine and one was a friend of a friend.

I gave em a rundown of the setting and stoked for the game, they poured their whole soul into their characters. Something just resonates in people about it. I can't really tell you why, because I don't know.

After the finale, we sat there in stunned silence for minute or two, just processing our emotions to ourselves.

My friend of a friend told us about what he'd been going through and how much that story meant to him. He said it meant there was more out there for him and that he was going to go and get it.

I haven't heard from him in a while but if you're reading this, buddy, I hope you're doing well.

That's not all. If there's enough interest, I'll be doing a crowdfunder to get actually skilled writers and artists and game designers to work on it and hopefully create something freaking awesome as a legacy for Eloquid Mathers. And of course, 10% of everything will go to organizations that help alcoholics.

So sign up for the email list and you'll get those three PDFs and you'll get first hand updates on the upcoming crowdfunder.

This might be the coolest thing I'll ever be a part of, and it might be one of the coolest things for you and other members of the dungeons & dragons community to be a part of.

It's my absolute privilege to be a part of this with you. So get on that email list and we'll talk soon.

Bye for now.

Okay, the people who are easy to convince have already joined the email list and are seeing for themselves how awesome these one shots are.

But you, my dear friend who hasn't joined already, are not easy to convince. I respect it.

For you I'll go all out. I'll even commit the grevious sin of providing spoilers and telling you really what is contained in the Mathers Files so you can make a fair judgement.

You wanted the spoilers. Here they are.

If you're a player and you'd rather hit the table cold, or if you're a DM who'd rather watch it happen while you're reading the adventure, stop here and get on the list. The PDFs will still be there. What's below is the twists and turns in each one, the part I was protecting in the first half of this letter. I'd rather you think I'm an idiot knowing the endings than have you wonder if I talked Eloquid Mathers up beyond his merit.

There are three files.

The first is The Throne of the Hollow King. I already told you the setup. A king. Nine sentinels. Three of them walked into the black with a piece of his power. Your players hear the pitch and think the prize is a chance to stand where those sentinels stood.

That's the lie.

What the King will not say, and what the table finds out by walking into the fog, is that the wall around the kingdom, keeping the miasma from destroying the kingdom, eats children. One kid from each village, in turn, so no single house feeds it alone and the villagers never catch on. The warden, one of the Sentinels, out there figured it out and would not hold the post. The knight Sentinel broke his vows because the job killed innocents, and he sits in a ruined gatehouse in rusted armor telling you he can't be redeemed. The third one, the king will not even say who he is, picked the people that the kingdom fed to the barrier. He waits in a barn with a scale in the middle of the floor and a ring of empty stools. He will not pick another person, and he will not come out.

Back in the palace there's a smith with no shadow. A thin gold chain runs from him up into the ceiling. He could break it. He doesn't. He hands over weapons that can kill a sentinel. On the anvil is a different sword, unfinished, and he says that one could kill the king. He will not give it to them.

Later, inside the walls again, a boy with silver eyes is standing at a lamppost. He tells them if the king dies right now, the miasma falls on the kingdom and that's the end of everybody. He points at an inn. His body is in the upstairs room.

That body is asleep. Sick. A chain runs from the bed, through the floor, into the earth. His face is the smith's face, younger.

The three pieces of power they took off those traitors are the only thing that drops the chain. It falls. The boy wakes. They walk him to the forge. The smith looks at his son, takes the gold chain in his own hand, breaks it, and finishes the sword.

Then they go back to the throne. Same whisper. He still wants them to stand where his sentinels stood.

They don't.

They fight him. Ordinary hits will not finish it. When he's hurt enough, somebody puts that sword in him. The black outside gets sucked into the king. When it's gone, the table is looking at green hills, a lake, a forest, and other people.

Kill him before that chain is off the boy and you don't get the hills. The dark just eats the place.

That is a worse thing to know ahead of time than Snape and Dumbledore, and I told you it would be. This is the one I ran in Salt Lake. I already told you what the third guy said after, and I'm not gonna say anything else about him. It's written for 3rd level, four or five people, about three or four hours, 2024 rules. Five ready-made characters are in the back if somebody shows up with dice and no sheet.

The second file is The Kingray. No castle this time. Space-Opera. Your players are clones of rich people inside a corporation that runs a huge number of planets. They're cargo. Spare bodies, headed for a work colony, in case one of those rich people needs an organ.

They wake in a cargo bay. Lights dead. The ship won't talk. The galley is empty.

They get the ship's mind coughing again, go up to the bridge, and there's one other ship hanging in the dark. The hull is painted in a lot of colors. The name on the side says the people aboard were peaceful, and brothers, and they kept to a leaf. I know how that sounds. Stay with me.

Those brothers are dwarf wizards. Their whole creed is they don't fight. They carry the corporation's worst machines out of its space so somebody else can start pulling the business apart. A space wave hit both ships, disabling them. The killing machines the dwarves were carrying woke up. The dwarves are dead in the passage with their weapons still stowed.

Their journal sends you to an asteroid. A clear bubble on the rock, a farm inside it, sun coming through the glass onto the rows. A man is standing in the rows with a holophone at his ear. He puts a hand up. Wait until my daughter is done.

Then he talks. The Holy Man on this asteroid was a slave of that corporation. They'd done things to his head I'm going to name, because the book names them: neurolinguistic manipulation and something called hourbending, used to make what the journal calls hell slaves, used to encrypt and sell a currency called Terrorwright. He got out. His wife is dead. She paid vampires with her own lifeblood so their daughter could have a first surgery. The girl is alive. She was the voice on that call. She got her medicine. She's recovering. A holy man got him the means to pay for it. He came to thank him, and he has not walked into the temple yet.

A woman outside the temple tells you, before you go in, that the holy man will not move, that the feeling in the room is compassion, and that reaching into his mind hurts. She also tells you his heart was taken. The corporation turned it into that currency.

You go in. He's a dwarf. He looks mummified. Red skin, muscle and bone showing, sitting still in a white cloth that's softer than anything else in the room. He was a slave. He escaped. The suffering is what made him what he is. The corporation sends a squad to drag him back. You stop them, or you don't.

If you stop them, he opens a round hole in space right in front of your ship, wide enough to fly through. He can hold it for about a minute. On the other side is a refuge past the edge of everything that corporation owns. Their ships don't go there. You fly through. Nobody on the other side hands you a new job. You're just out. You're free.

Eloquid Mathers ran this one for us on one of the other two nights. I'm not going to invent a player quote I don't have. What I will tell you is it's about two hours, four 6th-level characters, their own sheets, and it is built so the table starts the night as replacement parts and ends it by flying out of the company's reach. If that doesn't do anything for you, don't run it. I think it will.

The third file is called Infernal Prison Break but it should be called The Hellshard. If you only have a weeknight, don't start this one. It's six to eight hours, counting a break. Five 5th-level changeling gladiators. Fighters, barbarians, monks, paladins, rangers, rogues. You pick what the Fiend crowd calls you, and old debts between players who've known each other a long time. One fighter still doesn't know if a kindness was real. Somebody in the warren once covered a missed muster for them. That's the kind of thing your players are holding before the first gong.

They've been in this pit together for thousands of years. Die, and a new body grows in the room you picked. There is no gate out of the mountain. Holding back in a fight brings punishment down on everybody.

Dinner in a hall cut out of red rock. An imp with glasses and a clipboard rings a gong. He hopes they enjoyed the meal, because tonight is for important guests. Then a big frayed teddy bear with teeth growing all over him comes to the table and says this death might be real.

In the pit they drug him. Needles in the spine. His bones lengthen. Teeth come through skin. He doubles in size. He still finds their eyes. He still tries to speak. Then the black floods in, and he charges, and your players have to kill a friend, because the drug is going to do it anyway and the crowd is watching.

For one breath the black leaves his eyes. He closes their fingers around a small brass key. His last words are "Trust no one."

He does not grow back.

They lay him on the long table. For a few days the warren wears a piece of his last face. Teeth on a brow, a shoulder, a knuckle. The book tells you to ask each player where those teeth show up and what memory comes with them.

The key opens a lockbox. A chisel, a charcoal map, and a journal with the face scraped off the cover. Dead fighters have been handing that book down for generations. Each one added pages. Each one died in the pit before the hole was finished. The map leads to a false wall in an old room. Behind the wall is a dig full of broken tools left by the people who died digging. Under the rooms, a woman is screaming. Their screams stop when they come back to life. Hers doesn't.

You wanted a fair look, so here is the thing at the bottom of the tunnel they're digging.

It's a heart in an iron cage. It belongs to the woman who ran the orphanage they all grew up in before they ended up in Hell. She stood between these people and the thing at the door when they were small. The fiend who owns the pit tore that heart out of its time and built his hell around it. Your players have been his show for thousands of years, and they don't remember her until they're standing under the cage.

They can break the cage. The mountain cracks, the living ones spill out across Hell, she dies, and the past stays ruined.

Or they touch it.

They wake up upstairs. Small hands on a windowsill. Rain on cheap glass. Their own bodies, from before the arena, before any of this, before the first death. Their skills are still theirs. Their swords are not. She's downstairs, finishing a protection prayer. He's at the door. They've got about a minute. A kitchen knife. A fireplace poker. A chair leg. A pot lid for a shield.

He comes through the wall in a coat the rain doesn't touch. He counts them like inventory. Then he recognizes them. He offers one of them the pits if they'll stand aside. The offer is garbage.

If they drop him, the hell never gets built. The arena, the guests, the deaths, those leave history. Every soul he stole goes back to the life that was taken. She checks every child by touch, walks them upstairs, and stays until they sleep. The thousands of years fade like a bad dream. On the way out, that teddy bear grins through a hundred borrowed teeth, and the journal gets passed from hand to hand until the pages are blank. All the gladiators who died move on to whatever the next place is.

The book then asks the table three questions and lets the answers stand. Which face do you wear when nobody is watching? Which piece of him lasts the longest in the dream? What ordinary sound proves Hell is gone?

Those don't really make sense. Blame Grockbot. But you'll come up with something great in their stead, I know it. The spirit of Eloquid Mathers is with you.

This was one of the other two nights with Eloquid Mathers. I'm not putting a speech in anybody's mouth. I have thought about that orphanage more than I have thought about the king. You can do what you want with that.

I'm also going to tell you what you're walking a table into, because if I hide it you'll smell it and you'll be right. Slavery. A death that sticks. A man who ate with them for years and was never one of them. Body horror. In the last fight they are in childhood bodies, with everything they can do still in them. The book tells you to ask before you start. If the table doesn't want the child forms, you use the bodies they had as young adults and the scene runs the same. If they don't want the teeth and the opened body, you use iron masks, torn dolls, and voices, and the mechanics don't change. If they don't want captives forced to fight each other, the book gives you faceless doubles instead. I didn't clean the story up. I also didn't leave you with no way to run it for the people actually sitting at your table.

So that's the Mathers Files.

Three D&D 2024 one-shot adventures

They're free. I'm not a good enough writer to charge you for the way these are worded, and I'm not going to stand here and act like I am. What Eloquid Mathers asked, if I did anything with the three nights, was that 10% of whatever comes in go to organizations that help alcoholics. Right now nothing is coming in. The files are the signup. You join the list, I send the three PDFs, and when there's enough interest to pay actual writers and artists and game designers to build a real edition of his work, you hear it from me first.

The easy people are already running these. You stayed, which means you wanted the endings before you gave me an email address. You've got them.

Get on the list. I'll send the files. If you run one and all you get is the half-hearted "yeah, that was great," write me and say so. I'll believe you. And if your table does what Eloquid Mathers did to us, I want you close by for whatever we build next, because 10% of it is already promised, and the rest of it ought to have players in it who know what these nights are for.

We'll talk soon.

Bye for now.