For the most part, my series on personality features for each race has stuck to official D&D races, with the exception of homunculi. Today, though, I’m tackling one of the races of my own creation: the veytikka. I’ve talked about them a good bit in the past, and I’ll repost […]
Inigo Montoya: You are using Bonetti’s Defense against me, ah? Man in Black: I thought it fitting considering the rocky terrain. Inigo Montoya: Naturally, you must expect me to attack with Capo Ferro? Man in Black: Naturally, but I find that Thibault cancels out Capo Ferro. Don’t you? Inigo Montoya: […]
Note the paltry amount of filthy lucre. The piece is “Dragon Slayers and Proud of It,” by Larry Elmore. Last month, I talked about six different approaches to distributing cool treasure in tabletop games. Today I’m looking at the same question from a different angle. Let’s say you’ve figured out what’s […]
In my Aurikesh campaign, all of the characters belong to the Gallant Shields of Chardecum Mercenary Company. This is not very much like the private security companies of the modern day, and not (currently) all that much like the condottieri of Renaissance Italy that are their more direct inspiration. Instead of […]
I’ve been doing some hard work on magic item design over in Tribality, and I’ve talked a bit about the two 5e campaigns I play in, so in this post I’m looking at different approaches to magic items in roleplaying games. I’ve identified six so far, which is my justification […]
I’m introducing a lot of new players to my 5e Aurikesh campaign all at once, so I had to sit down and write out all of the house rules that have accreted in the three-years-and-change that we’ve been playing. This post, then, is to discuss why they exist; if you’ve […]
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, […]
A few weeks ago, I ran a session of D&D in my Aurikesh campaign that everyone at the table really enjoyed, and I wanted to write about what made that particular session and storyline work, what minor things I could have done better, and so on. To do that, though, […]
In my (now long-running) D&D Next/5e game, the players explored a dungeon called the Monastery of the Blessed Scroll (layout based on Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire). I run very few dungeons that take much more than 2-3 sessions at most to explore, so this post documents what I did, and […]
I’ve been posting a lot lately about the work I’m doing on skill challenges, and now that I’ve had a chance to run two of them by my players, I’m posting about what I think worked and, more importantly, what I think didn’t work. Fair warning – this gets a […]
