Dungeon Fatigue and Its Solutions 4

This post is a compilation and expansion of ideas first discussed in a series of Twitter threads, initially in response to a thread by Enrique Bertran, the NewbieDM, from October 25, 2018. I’ve returned to the idea in a number of threads since then – you’ll notice that I go […]


A Twelfth Year of Blogging

What do you know, I actually missed my blog’s birthday! I am a bad blog dad. Anyway, this is the 527th post in this blog after 12 years of writing. If you’ve been with me since the beginning or joined somewhere along the way – thanks. I appreciate you. It […]


LARP Design: World-building Do’s and Don’ts

I’m in the place of loving LARP writing and gamerunning, but not knowing if I’ll ever write or run another game, for reasons of time, energy, and the life commitments of having kids. That’s why I write so many blog posts of LARP design these days – I hope to […]


Session Postmortem: The Battle of Leonor’s Hill 5

On Saturday, 22 October, 2022, I ran the 117th session of my Aurikesh campaign. I was trying some unusual stuff mechanically, and in this post, I’m going to talk about what worked, what didn’t, and how I could improve the concept. We all know that getting mass combat to work […]


D&D 5e: A New Batch of 4e Spells 5

I was looking through my 4e megathread the other day and made a list of the spells and magic items from it that I still wanted to try bringing into 5e. There’s a lot of meat left on that bone. Part One | Part Two Cerulean Shield 3rd-level abjuration (cleric, […]


Bounty Hunters: Two Tables and a Feat 4

I got the first draft of a major project done, so I’m giving some time to more bounty-hunting content. Writing and talking about the UA 2022: Expert Classes document has me thinking about feat design, so I’m starting with a Bounty Hunter feat. After all, in a bounty hunting campaign, […]


Adventure Postmortem: Dragon Heist 1

At 2:45 am on Saturday, September 17, my Dragon Heist group finished the published adventure. It’s not the end of the campaign, just the official material. We’ll be having further conversations about their goals and what comes next, but this seems like a good time to look at what worked […]


Ruby Talon Deeps: Locations 2 2

It’s been a lot longer than I realized since I last wrote something about the Ruby Talon Deeps dungeon. As a reminder, I’m still in the high-level brainstorming phase, so what I’m offering are area descriptions and rules concepts rather than full details. I’m hoping this acts as a design […]


Bounty-Hunting Stories 3

One of my big takeaways from the release of Spelljammer: Adventures in Spaaaaace (there’s a misprint in the books and on the slipcase where Spaaaaace is missing four of its a’s, I don’t know what to tell you) is that while bounty-hunting adventures are great in a lot of settings, […]


Great Old Ones of Aurikesh 7

My homebrew setting supports the Great Old One warlock pact (while hoping for a serious rework of its features in ’24), but doesn’t use HPL’s Mythos entities or (for the most part) the canonical D&D Great Old Ones. Within the setting they’re called the Abominations, and according to legend they […]