Extraordinary locations are at the heart of all great RPG adventures. They provide the cinematic settings of our shared stories, inspiring our players to interact with and explore the worlds that we inhabit in our imagination, while offering abundant opportunities for magic, intrigue, danger, and adventure — the very reasons we come to the table […]
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I’ve tried to fix falling in D&D twice already. Maybe, I even succeeded. But since I wasn’t able to recall my own house rules during a recent session, without looking them up, they don’t quite fulfil my twin needs of being a) more realistic than the official rules but also b) being simple enough to […]
Over the course of 2025, I’ve seen multiple bloggers and Youtubers attempt to fix D&D 5.5’s new hiding rules. While these are all folks I respect, most of their revisions ended up as 2,000+ word treatises full of technical jargon that made me want to reach for the Ibuprofen more than my gemstones. So, as […]
In my last post I talked about the maxim: “rulings, not rules”. Living by this maxim can drastically speed up your game, as making a quick ruling about a situation and getting on with the game is obviously far faster than poring through the handbooks and trying to reach consensus on the “correct” way to […]
This list was first published in 2017 (I think!), and most recently updated in October 2025. 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 […]
Despite starting my RPG journey with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in the late 80s, I have almost zero nostalgia for the early days of D&D. It was fun at the time, but laboriously making my way through an improbable dungeon, prodding every square inch of stone with a 10-foot-pole for traps, all so I can […]
Adventurers wanting to break down a door is a really common scenario in D&D, but one that can be surprisingly hard to adjudicate, especially when the players are under no time pressure. The desire to transform a door into shards of timber typically occurs when the rogue fails their Dexterity check with thieves’ tools, leading […]
Being able to improvise interesting NPCs is a key skill for DMs, in my opinion. Credible NPCs create the illusion of a credible world, and help the players stay immersed in the story. While encountering another “bearded dwarf called Bob” really exposes the fact that we are just making this shit up as we go […]
I finished running my first ever D&D “intrigue” adventure recently. Since a) it went pretty well and b) it was quite a different adventuring experience to our usual sessions, I thought it would make a good topic for a blog post. A while back I tried to categorise all the possible Dungeons & Dragons quest […]
What is the most valuable resource that I – as an RPG creator – can provide for my fellow Game Masters? That was the question confronting me around this time last year when an American publisher slipped into my DMs to discuss a new book publication. So many possibilities… and yet, so many potential pitfalls […]
