I completely gave the Sunless Citadel a miss during its first release, back in the early days of 3.0. As most readers undoubtedly recall, there was far more than enough D&D material to spend money, even before the OGL content glut. It has been lightly retooled for 5e in Tales […]
Note the paltry amount of filthy lucre. The piece is “Dragon Slayers and Proud of It,” by Larry Elmore. Last month, I talked about six different approaches to distributing cool treasure in tabletop games. Today I’m looking at the same question from a different angle. Let’s say you’ve figured out what’s […]
I’ve been doing some hard work on magic item design over in Tribality, and I’ve talked a bit about the two 5e campaigns I play in, so in this post I’m looking at different approaches to magic items in roleplaying games. I’ve identified six so far, which is my justification […]
In every edition of D&D I’ve played, I’ve spent much more time as a DM than as a PC. I played maybe two sessions of 2e, compared to the hundred-or-so that I ran. I ran considerably more 3.x than 2e, maybe double or so, but also played a good bit […]
We just finished a pretty important side-quest in my D&D campaign and the session went really well, so I want to talk about some of the things that I did to prepare for it and how it all worked out. Special thanks go to Stands-in-Fire, who normally plays in this […]
Something odd happened in my tabletop campaign last weekend. In an eight-hour session, there were two fights, one of which resolved inconclusively (no one lost hit points or suffered debilitating conditions on either side) and one of which was over before the single NPC’s first turn (having egregiously lost initiative). […]
Tabletop games, like video games, have long had a concept of a “boss fight,” a climactic end to an adventure or series of adventures. Starting from that similar position, though, video games have done far more creative things with the concept, while tabletop games have scarcely advanced beyond what MMO […]
Paper Sorcerer, developed by Jesse Gallagher, displays just how far a game can go on a unique visual aesthetic and a classic format and feel. It offers some additions to traditional dungeon crawl that other games could stand to lift, and it deserves considerable praise for that. It is, on […]
Over the past three weeks, I’ve run three sessions of D&D 5th edition. Across all of these sessions, there have been eighteen different players (Kainenchen played in all three, though very little in the last case; our son was uncooperative). Ranging from people who have played 5e since the earliest […]
In my (now long-running) D&D Next/5e game, the players explored a dungeon called the Monastery of the Blessed Scroll (layout based on Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire). I run very few dungeons that take much more than 2-3 sessions at most to explore, so this post documents what I did, and […]
