I’ve been listening to a lot of the Court of Swords podcast lately, so I assume that its recent blood-transfusion stories have a lot to do with where the ideas for these magic items came from. Anyway, over in Twitter I wrote: Since wizards can capture spells from enemy wizards […]
A few days ago in Twitter, and in a friend’s Discord channel, I posed some questions about how a setting might respond to the existence of charm person and, implicitly, higher-grade mind-control magic. I want to be 100% clear about this: this is a thought experiment, not me telling you […]
A recent conversation over in the social medias (join my Dungeons & Dragons 5e group in MeWe) with Cam Banks has me thinking about other takes on elves. In particular, he was looking for lower-magic elves with no cantrips or teleports. There’s not a lot of official content that points […]
I’ve been digging into Waterdeep: Dragon Heist like a whole lot of 5e fans right now. I think this book acknowledges and incorporates the Spellplague more than any other adventure we’ve seen so far, which is to say any – but I haven’t read every adventure and may have missed things. There’s […]
In D&D 5e, Backgrounds grant a modest assortment of equipment and a pocketful of starting cash. For many campaigns, this is fine and appropriate. You’re playing wanderers, sellswords, not to say murderhoboes, and a broader base of social and material assets will at best be in a town halfway across the […]
Some time back, Kainenchen and I were talking about campaigns that pit multiple factions of antagonists against one another, and for the PCs it’s devil take the hindmost. We came up with two different takes on the same high concept: a Planescape/Ravenloft mashup. I’m going to discuss both of them a […]
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 […]
If I’m going to host a blog carnival about the Wise, I might as well talk about my own settings too, right? Today I’m talking about Aurikesh, the setting of my current tabletop game. Probably the best summary of the Wise of Aurikesh that I’ve written so far comes from […]
Many fantasy literature settings have their own unique spin on wizards and, at least as important, how wizards interact with one another. In this month’s RPG Blog Carnival, I’d love to hear about your setting’s (or favorite fantasy novel’s) wizards, their society, and what makes them unique. To celebrate my […]
Today I have for you a subclass – well, two subclasses, but heavily overlapping – that rely on some setting assumptions about wizards that are definitely not true in all settings. If you’re not already allowing and banning subclasses based on how they fit your campaign’s theme, cosmology, and society, […]
