D&D 5e Playtest: The (Alternate) Ranger

In this month’s Unearthed Arcana, Mearls describes the community’s lukewarm-at-best reaction to 5e’s Ranger class and presents a very different vision of what that class name might mean. Quite a while back, I wrote about my own views on the class, and thanks to the State of the Game podcast, […]


D&D 5e: The Dwarven Personality 2

My breakdown of elven personality, with traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws, was kindly received, so I have moved on to dwarves. This is still some serious easy-mode of stereotypes, but even halflings are a less-trodden ground than elves and dwarves in fantasy. As before, I’ve made no effort here to […]


D&D 5e: The Elven Personality 5

In the Unearthed Arcana playtest document that included the minotaur race, the designers included traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws specific to the race, which proved to be a great way to present ready-to-play stereotypes of the minotaurs. (Remember, kids: stereotyping is awful in Real Life, but when used correctly, it is immensely […]


D&D 5e: Demon-scarred Barbarian Path

This is an idea I’ve been meaning to write up for awhile. The two Paths of the Barbarian class are cool, and the Totem Barbarian can be a lot of different things… like a really good melee ranger, thanks to some really stylish options. I’m sorry, rangers. Your lives are […]


D&D 5e: Five New Magic Items from Aurikesh

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted magic items I created for my Aurikesh campaign, so I’m posting a bunch of them now. The first four of these, my PCs have just learned that they have, thanks to identify; the fifth is out there somewhere in the setting, and might or […]


D&D 5e: The Trouble with Friends

A conversation sprang up yesterday in my blog post about the Royal Sorcerer origin subclass. In that conversation, I was correctly called out for some shoddy design. Specifically, I gave the royal sorcerer the ability to make the friends cantrip cover its tracks with 100% effectiveness. This isn’t a good idea, […]


D&D 5e Playtest: Modern Magic

It’s a new month, so there’s a new Unearthed Arcana. This time out, they’re revisiting the idea of 5e set in a modern world, which came up some months ago in another post. Specifically, they’re dealing with spellcasting classes reworked for the modern world. Now, I don’t have a whole […]


RPG Blog Carnival: Weapons of Legend

The RPG Blog Carnival for July is about Weapons of Legend, a topic that is near and dear to my heart. In Dust to Dust, there are eleven living weapons of immense power. In D&D terms, you’d call them artifact-level weapons, and not wussy artifacts, either. There are also Named […]


D&D 5e Playtest: Awakened Mystic

The new playtest packet for the Mystic class – known in other editions as the Psionicist – went up on the Wizards of the Coast website today in Unearthed Arcana. Since I’m also working on an edition-by-edition exploration of psionics over in Tribality right now, I’m primed to be excited […]


D&D 5e: Three New Spells, One New Pact, One New Patron

In my campaign, I recently introduced warlocks serving the Nightwalker, my setting’s version of the Grim Reaper. The PCs have known they would eventually run into such warlocks, but this is the first time it has happened. Obviously, that meant I had to write a new Patron option for the […]