Review: Ghosts of Saltmarsh The spring 2019 release for Dungeons & Dragons is a compilation of older adventures. Like 2017’s Tales From the Yawning Portal. Like that product, Ghosts of Saltmarsh is a “low energy update” of adventures from previous […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
E-Diction War THAC0 or “to hit armour class 0” was the kludge way 2nd Edition got around having to have charts and tables determine if an attack roll was successful, using some reverse addition and funky math. So if you […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Review: Tomb of Annihilation The seventh large storyline adventure for the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons is the Tomb of Annihilation. Advertised as an reimagining of the “classic” deathtrap dungeon, the Tomb of Horrors, the adventure features the return […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Building a Fantasy World XIV: Player’s Guide After laboriously establishing the details of your fantasy world, you’ll (hopefully) have a chance to introduce it to your players and run a campaign in your sparkly new world. The adventures have been hooked, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Health & Hitpoints Let’s start by paraphrasing Winston Churchill: hitpoints are the worst possible system for tracking health except all others that have been tried. Hitpoints are terrible for verisimilitude and an awful reflection of reality. They’re also not particularly […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Monsters With Class With the design of 5th edition still underway, I wanted to rant a little about the ability (or rather the current inability) to add PC classes to monsters. Being able to make an orc into an orc […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
On the grid I have fond memories of dungeons on blue graph paper. Blue graph paper is one of the stronger memories from my early days playing D&D. I spent ages drawing crazy and random dungeons on said graph paper, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Family Values I try not to edition war too much. Emphasis on the “too”. I have my preferences but have been rolling dice long enough to know that if the group is good the system is largely irrelevant to the […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Might I like that giants in D&D Next have returned to a more restrained strength compared to 3rd Edition, where their numbers went up and up. But 5th Edition are getting a little close to a problem we ran into […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Building a Fantasy Campaign World I: The Hook The is the first part on my series on world building.In the introduction, I discussed Top-Down and Bottom-Up design, as well as some of the pros and cons of each. Today I’m […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Building a Fantasy Campaign World: Introduction This is the start of a new series discussing world building and the creation of campaign settings. With 4th Edition winding down and many new campaigns looming on the horizon, ready to start when 5th […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
DM May I? A term I keep hearing around the interwebs and on the message boards is “DM May I?” It’s based around rules lite systems where there is less baked in PC options, and player must ask if they […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
