It’s been voted the best fight in cinema history… and if you’re fresh from watching Kill Bill recently, then you probably finished the film with a (violent?) urge to play Gogo Yubari on a Dungeons & Dragons table very soon. The only problem is… the meteor hammer (an ancient Chinese weapon) doesn’t exist in D&D. […]
Author: duncan (Page 2 of 12)
In general teleportation works pretty well in Dungeons & Dragons. At low levels, when the characters don’t have access to spells like teleportation circle, journeys are arduous and fraught with danger. Then, at mid-to-high levels, when the party have exhausted that style of play, and their characters can’t be challenged by bandits, broken bridges and […]
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 […]
