Dressed For Success The return of the #flumphening! Wizards do have a propensity for long flowing beards. It’s such a common trope. It meshes with the idea of age equalling wisdom and wizards being exceptionally wise, so a long beard […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Unnatural Knowledge By default, all player characters are literate. Which feels like a bit of a stretch, even for fantastical medieval worlds. Literacy used to be exceptionally rare. And yet regardless of upbringing and background, all PCs can read and […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
False Advertising There’s a fine line between a “Wizard” and a “Magician”. And if you advertise for one in a fantasy world you’d better hope you get the exact type you want. Everyone in Waterdeep knows of the infamous time […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Semiclimax A comic right out of my Tomb of Annihilation game. Although the character in question was really a grippli rogue, played by my pretty wife. And she’s pretty insistent it was actually a “superclimax”. Climaxes are actually really hard to […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Muscle Magic There was an internet joke for a while that there needed to be a spellcasting class that used Strength as it’s primary attribute, much like wizards used Intelligence and sorcerers used Charisma. Strength was mostly the purview of […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Change is in the Air The public playtest for Pathfinder 2 dropped the other day, with hard copies for those who pre-ordered and PDFs for everyone else. I’ve been slowly working through the documents and might eventually gets some thoughts […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Dress For Success I wonder how many NPCs want to be adventurers and try to learn class skills. The gap between commoner and classed characters is pretty huge, so you’d think everyone would want to make that leap, increasing the […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Uneven Odds The “take 20” rule in 3rd Edition worked but was awkward. Unless there was a time limit, there was no reason not to spend 2 minutes completely checking every inch of every 5-cubic-feet of a room. Or spend […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Dark Background As a DM it’s important to give your villains realistic and interesting origins. But unless the players know this backstory, they have precious little impact on the campaign. Conveying this information is the tricky part. Very often it’s […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Hot Stuff Coming Through Another strip pulled directly from my home game. Is lava rock to be made muddier? Mud to be turned rockier? Does it become fast moving boiling mud or steaming red-hot stone? So many questions and so […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Rock Fell, Nobody Died There is the tension when you have a semi-consumable magical item that can solve your problems at hand, but it has limited charges and might go away if you use the last one. You have to […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Crouching Peg, Hidden Hole D&D and similar RPGs are games are a weird mash-up of cultures and troped. knights from the Middle Ages, allied with Norse demihumans and Arthurian wizards fight monsters from Germanic folklore and Greco-Roman mythology. Then you […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
