For some time I’ve been deliberating over designing a Name of the Rose-inspired murder mystery adventure for D&D. The imagery of weary travellers arriving at a remote monastery in the dead of winter has a certain romantic appeal, while the sinister atmosphere of a body count increasing in an isolated community feels like something that […]
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Long before the pandemic began, D&D was already heading online. Digital toolsets like D&D Beyond are far more efficient than pen and paper at tracking hit points, gear and level progression, Discord servers can be used to neatly file campaign information, while the world’s first virtual tabletop, Fantasy Grounds, launched in 2004, challenging the possibilities […]
As the nights get darker and the days get colder (at least for those of us tuning in from the northern hemisphere!), it’s become a tradition at this time of the year for D&D players to embrace the scarier side of fantasy. Now, given that our favourite tales of horror are often rooted in helplessness […]
The Dungeon Coach is one of the best D&D 5e homebrewers out there, in my opinion, and in this video he talks about the inferior damage output of two weapon fighting (aka dual-wielding) in 5e, vs. two-handed weapon fighters, and why he feels that’s unfair. After all, both these offensive styles require using both hands […]
It took me all of five seconds to pile in on various feats and class abilities I felt were too deadly when I first started this blog in 2016… but it’s taken me five years to tackle 5th edition’s most commonly-occurring damage spike: sneak attack. The reason being, of course, that when it comes to […]
When I wrote Dragonbowl, on top of writing the storyline, I found myself including little bits of advice that DMs might profit from in their bid to extract maximum drama from the adventure. Perhaps the most interesting was a box out about plot armour. And the reason it’s interesting (for me at least) is because […]
A while ago, I proposed six alternatives to the overused trope of starting your D&D adventure in a tavern. When M.T. Black recently asked his Twitter followers what fun variations they had seen to the “you all meet in a tavern” adventure beginning, I shared my article and then condensed my six alternatives (plus the […]
For a vast industry fuelled by folks that love writing, I was shocked by how few decent D&D blogs I was able to find when I first got back into the hobby in 2015/16. Luckily that has changed over time, as via word of mouth, forums or social media I’ve slowly discovered a wealth of […]
Ever since I watched Matt Mercer DM in Force Grey, I’ve been thinking: wouldn’t it be cool to have a list of Mercer-esque descriptions for all of D&D’s most common incantations to hand come game night? The chance of me being able to ad-lib something as evocative as Matt’s description of tongues, when the target’s […]
Back when Dungeons & Dragons was about clearing out dungeons, there were some tasks that players performed in EVERY room they entered, more or less in this order. Search for traps / hidden monsters Loot the corpses of dead monsters (having killed them) Search the room for additional loot and Search for secret doors / […]
