I like creepy monsters with unsettling concepts or visuals as much as anyone, so I was thrilled when I was asked to stat out and expand upon the Alchemist Testing Apparatus, the Ledgerman, and the Red Leech Tide. These monsters were designed for J.M. Perkins’s Salt in Wounds Setting; click here to learn […]
I recently ran a playtest session of Over the Edge’s 25th Anniversary Edition. OtE has been my wife’s very favoritest game since we picked up the 1992 edition some years back, so when we heard there was going to be a new version, of course we were thrilled. This post […]
I’ve talked many times in this blog about the format of my Aurikesh campaign, but today I want to dig into it in detail, both for its strengths and its weaknesses. The fundamental format isn’t in any way unique to Aurikesh; from what I have read, it seems to have […]
The Aurikesh campaign is set in an early-colonial period, and revolution of various kinds (political, technological, cosmic) is a central theme. Several existing backgrounds touch on ideas of overthrowing the established order and expressions of zeal – the Acolyte, the Criminal, the Folk Hero, and the Hermit all come to […]
You know, when I wrote the first post in this whole series, I said straight out that I wasn’t going to do separate posts for subraces, which was absolutely about my stomach-turning reluctance to try to write drow personalities that are remotely playable in group environments (but aren’t all clones […]
Shortly after I sold my first article to ENWorld, full of Halloween-themed subclasses, I tried to do something similar with winter-themed subclasses. It didn’t fly, and it was a little while longer before I tried again. The important thing is that the Winter Kin sorcerous origin is something I dreamed […]
It’s been awhile, but I have an ongoing series in this blog where I dig deeper into the non-human races of D&D and give them tables of traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws, as additional or replacement options for the personality features of their Backgrounds. We come now to the dragonborn, […]
In my History of the Classes column on Tribality.com, I mentioned the idea of running a single-class 5e campaign, permitting only the Paladin class. Rather than leave it there, though, this post explores the potential of each class for a single-class campaign and similar deviations from “normal” party breakdowns. This […]
Okay, I don’t know how many of you played Bungie’s excellent Myth series of turn-based tactical games, with releases in 1997, 1998, and 2001. Judging by the fact that the series hasn’t seen a release since 2001, I’m going with “not enough of you.” I don’t pretend that I was skilled […]
O sages standing in God’s holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. –W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” Okay, I’ll fess up – this isn’t a post about how to use […]
