domains - feats - monsters - magic items - spells - patrons - and more
See More »In gradually continuing to develop the Aurikesh setting, I’m working in no particular order – I’m just writing about ideas as they come to me. My focus is on defining and exploring the setting’s aesthetic. I am particularly interested in making it clearly different from the other two settings I […]
The armor chart of the D&D Next playtesting materials is odd, as many have commented, but I want to start this post by making it clear that I’ll be talking about 5e’s armor only in general terms, not in specifics. I get that it’s not a finalized design and nitpicking […]
I realize that relatively few readers are interested in Aurikesh, but I have fun writing about it. For this post, I will create a list of seven dungeons or dungeon-like locations in Aurikesh, all famous enough that players could start play knowing about them, though that doesn’t necessarily mean that […]
The company that I work for, MFV (née Icarus Studios), has begun a Kickstarter project so that we can create a video game of MageKnight. I am one of the designers on this project, and I am hugely, overwhelmingly excited about potentially getting to make this game. If you can […]
In many live-action games, there exists a mechanic to represent the players’ actions between events, since otherwise players can only take part in the world and its goings-on for maybe twelve (for some games, as many as twenty-four) days out of every year. Since the plot committee is dedicated to […]
A long while back, I posted a comparison of the treatment of religion, divine magic, and worship in seven different settings. This is relevant in that today I want to talk about the problems I have with clerics in fantasy gaming, particularly the various editions of D&D. These problems, I […]
There’s been a good bit of information distributed on spellcasting in D&D Next, most recently this; the broader ENWorld aggregation of information on wizards and spellcasting is found here. These pieces of information might or might not contradict one another, depending on how you want to interpret them. Today I’d […]
So, for Dust to Dust, we have introduced a number of games-within-the-game. I’ve commented at some length about Wizard Dueling before. This works well in LARPs, because even when things are scheduled well and everything is on time, there will be downtime that could stand to be filled. It’s just […]
On Memorial Day, I ran a session of the D&D Next playtest with Kainenchen, Stands-in-Fire, Samhaine, and two more friends. If, like my players and me, you have never before played through the Caves of Chaos, then either turn back or be comfortable with some minor spoilers. This will be your […]
This post will be something relatively close to liveblogging my reactions to reading through the D&D Next (I still think of it as 5th edition) material. Note that I haven’t played or run any of it yet, and won’t until Monday. Also, I can point to things here that contradict […]
