When I wrote DRAGONBOWL, I needed to imagine a transport infrastructure that would allow the gladiatorial festival to ‘pop up’ in locations around Faerun, including in a massive cavern in Mount Waterdeep – and that infrastructure meant a lot of teleportation. As I tried to fathom out how to recreate ‘sci-fi’ style teleportation stations in […]
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, players controlling steeds, sidekicks, pets or summoned creatures on the D&D battlefield is a bit of pet peeve of mine. I don’t like it when one player has dramatically more ‘screen time’ than all the others (like most players, whether they admit it or not, I get more satisfaction […]
After watching Treantmonk’s superb subclass ranking series I was excited when the rules-savvy vlogger published a video in which he claimed to ‘fix D&D’ with just three house rules. I was left absolutely flabbergasted when the first of these rules was to remove the shield spell from the game! Wtf? If I was going to […]
As discussed on a recent blog post, I don’t like Sneak Attack too much as a mechanic, for a variety of reasons (mostly related to balance and credibility). Wary of attempting an extensive rewrite of this rather fundamental feature, I concluded that post with a simple House Rule which I will be testing out in […]
So with new versions of the Dungeons & Dragons core rulebooks scheduled for release in 2024, I thought it might be fun to have my say on what I’d like ‘6th edition D&D’ to look like, just in case the game’s designers are frantically scouring the Internet for any last minute inspiration and insights by […]
I’ve seen people argue that there are only three fundamental adventure types in Dungeons & Dragons: Fetch, Kill and Discover. However, you won’t have to wrack your brains too long to think of a story that falls outside those rather narrow restraints. The blog Master The Dungeon proposes seven core quest types: Fetch, Kill, Escort, […]
One summer’s day in 2021, feeling restless, I walked down the leafy Passeig de Sant Joan boulevard in Barcelona and popped into the Gigamesh fantasy bookstore. Half on a whim, and half with an adventure idea in the back of my mind, I picked up a copy of the (then) recently published Candlekeep Mysteries and […]
I’m currently about half way through penning an epic post reviewing each of the adventures in the Candlekeep Mysteries anthology (it’s now live!). So far, the adventure that has spoken to me the most is The Price of Beauty, a 5th level adventure written by Mark Hulmes. ***For DMs ONLY. Contains spoilers for The Price […]
Not so long ago I quoted exhaustion as being one of the 15 reasons I love 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. Given the often deranged mental gymnastics we have to do to make hit points make sense, it’s great to have a second, separate mechanic that measures life force, and moreover one that – unlike […]
