A conversation on the bird site a week or so ago got me thinking about a genetic-manipulation artificer subclass. I let the idea sit for a week to see if anything bubbled up as an idea, and… here we are. Let’s find out, together.
To be clear, it’s called “Bloodcrafter” because directly referencing genes felt too science fiction-y for a class that definitely accomplishes its stuff through magic. It’s not about crafting blood into things, though that’s also...
2023-04-14 02:11:32 +0000 UTC
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Whether you’re using Seas of Vodari and Tribality’s Naval Combat supplement, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, or just sending the characters on a sea voyage, you can add more interaction and texture by focusing on individual crew members...
2023-03-29 17:19:22 +0000 UTC
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For that upcoming Tribality project that I’ve mentioned, I’m writing traps based on gunpowder and firearms for use in D&D 5e. Er, without just making a numbers-bolted-on collection of gunpowder bombs and land mines, I guess. If you want those for your game, that’s fine, but you can read the Damage Severity by Level table just as well as I can.
Flashplate
Simple trap, level 1-4 (moderate threat)
This trap is a layer of black powder betwee...
2023-03-16 17:01:55 +0000 UTC
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On Sunday, 19 February, I ran the 122nd session of the Aurikesh campaign, in which the PCs gathered a rag-tag fleet of ships and led it against the blockade at the mouth of the river that leads to their city. I used the same essential approach here as in the Battle of Leonor's Hill, attempting to learn from errors in the previous session.
What follows are my ses...
2023-02-20 20:27:16 +0000 UTC
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It’s been awhile since I’ve written new magic items for this blog, huh? Over a year? No, that doesn’t make any sense. But here we are, I guess. Anyway, this is a collection of magical firearms for an upcoming Tribality release. (Not Under the Seas of Vodari – thankfully that is out of our hands and into the hands of God and the printers!)
Banisher
Weapon (musket or rifle), rare (requires attunement)
The iron or steel barrel o...
2023-02-11 03:33:45 +0000 UTC
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It’s been over a year since my last post in the Villain’s Schemes series, but since it’s gotten a lot harder in the last week to write D&D content with confidence, I’m just writing about stories and antagonists now – even if it’s using the 5e DMG for its backbone. (This isn’t a post about the trash fire of the 1.1 OGL or the greatest self-inflicted wound in the history of gaming.) As a reminder, what I do in these articles is examine each scheme across all four tier...
2023-01-24 19:44:26 +0000 UTC
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One Leak (with apologies to the Barenaked Ladies)
It’s been one week since you leaked to us
Codega’s article dropped, you said, “We’re greedy”
Five business days in the US
Saying, “We’ll be sharing more soon, thanks for your patience.”
Three days since the D&D Beyond tweet
We realize it’s a C-level’s fault, but c’mon now
Yesterday, a canceled stream
But it’ll still be two days ‘til you say you’re sorry
Hold it n...
2023-01-13 18:43:22 +0000 UTC
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For my Aurikesh campaign, way back in 2012 for D&D Next, I wrote a Seeker class (several iterations appear in this blog) for a creepy occultist gunslinger concept, very much taken from Torchlight 2’s Outlander. In the years since then, Tribality has created a gunslinger class (now found in Seas of Vodari). In this post I’m bringing that creepy occultist theme to Tribality’s class. Other names I’m considering for this subclass include the Harvester or Soul Harvest...
2023-01-01 04:10:59 +0000 UTC
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Just to be the first kid on the block dipping a toe into homebrewed One D&D design, I’m exploring some new Holy Orders for the Cleric Class, as released in the new UA document. (See my full breakdown of the document on Tribality.) I really like the ...
2022-12-07 18:32:08 +0000 UTC
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What do you know, I actually missed my blog’s birthday! I feel so guilty. 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 has been another busy year, and I’ve been writing as much as I can on various freelance projects. This time last year, I was waiting with bated breath for 2022-11-22 05:08:11 +0000 UTC
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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 from “I haven’t played Tomb of Annihilation” to talking about what I learned from playing Tomb of Annihilation. As of current writing, I haven’t played Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage...
2022-11-21 22:27:46 +0000 UTC
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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 pass on my perspective and what I’ve learned, so that another LARP-runner can make more interesting and rarefied mistakes. Also, I hope to spark enjoyable conversations.
To that end, this is a post about world-building spe...
2022-11-07 21:29:10 +0000 UTC
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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 well and include everyone in a TTRPG is hard, but I needed a mass combat, so this is what I created.
What follows are my session prep notes, then my commentary starting at How It Went. There’s...
2022-10-25 02:47:47 +0000 UTC
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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
2022-10-19 15:19:23 +0000 UTC
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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, the bounty hunting gameplay is explicitly not class-locked.
2022-10-05 19:24:55 +0000 UTC
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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 and what didn’t for this group in Waterdeep: Dragon Heist (Winter Wizardry) and Blue Alley. For us, it ...
2022-09-18 19:12:01 +0000 UTC
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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 diary, brings up some fun weirdness, and entertains you in some way.
Map |
2022-09-10 19:26:31 +0000 UTC
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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, they’re even better here, maybe with a killer intro theme and soundtrack. Or starring a guy in full plate with a tool-belt of magic weapons. (Let me recommend 2022-08-29 21:16:30 +0000 UTC
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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 come from a time when a group of powerful mages tried to exploit the range limit of the teleport spell.
To break that down a little more: you can teleport without failure to ...
2022-08-12 17:02:52 +0000 UTC
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It has once again been a long time since I’ve touched this series, but I’ve cleared enough other projects to take some time for things I’d like to publish on the DM’s Guild someday. I hope it’s something you (yes, you!) would want to buy.
Summer Court | Gloaming Court<...
2022-07-29 19:54:30 +0000 UTC
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As we make further progress on Under the Seas of Vodari, I got to write some additional location and adventure hook entries, to build in some extra creepy or weird things for our adventurers to investigate. It’s been a busy month of editing and writing, as well as a family vacation, so I thought I’d show you some of what I’ve been working on!
Obviously, there's plenty of context that isn't available in these entries, but appears in the rest of Chapter 2: Undersea World of...
2022-07-25 03:55:41 +0000 UTC
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This topic comes to mind because, as LARPing reopens in the South (in the summer… we all do things we regret), I’ve gotten to see a surprisinglyeffective new(-to-me) development in dungeon presentation in boffer LARPing. To explain it, I want to work through the history of dungeon setups I’ve seen in LARPs. This post elaborates on a number of things I said in Modul...
2022-06-27 19:46:43 +0000 UTC
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A friend of mine, Steve Chambers, is the origin of this idea: a paladin who is a magical bouncer. I’m just running with that and turning it into as cool of a paladin oath as I can, then hoping Steve and his gaming group like it. I’m also surprised to realize how long it’s been since the last time I created a paladin oath!
Oath of Hospitality
The obligations that bind a host and a guest are thefundamental sign of civilization. Many uphold this duty...
2022-06-13 23:31:59 +0000 UTC
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I was playing Minecraft Dungeons with my 5-year-old a couple of weeks ago, and saw some absolutely amazing unique item names, which I commented on in Twitter. Starless Night and void bow got me thinking about weapons of the cosmos, and it was a short hop from there to something based on the malevolent stars of 4e/5e cosmology: Acamar (historical footnote! Also, “Sixth Star of the C...
2022-05-31 20:18:40 +0000 UTC
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I wanted to play with some other areas of folklore, and these new spells came out of it. I was also interested in trying a new mechanical concept that came to me, as you’ll see (create poppet).
Animate Hut
5th-level transmutation (druid, warlock, wizard)
Casting Time: 1 minute
Range: Touch
Components: V, S, M (leg and foot bones from one creature)
Duration: Conc...
2022-05-06 04:29:35 +0000 UTC
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It’s been years since I was an active video game reviewer, but when I was offered a review copy of the roguelike deck builder ROGUEBOOK for the Switch, I jumped at the chance. The email billed the game as being for people who liked Slay the Spire and Monster Train, and friends, I am extremely that person.
Core Gameplay
Roguebook tells the story of two heroes, Sharra and S...
2022-04-21 12:58:35 +0000 UTC
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There are a couple of spells that have shown up in Aurikesh for which I promised actual rules “sometime soon,” which apparently means today. Since those two spells don’t a satisfying post make, I’ve added in a few more ideas.
Protection from Moonlight
3rd-level abjuration (bard, cleric, druid, paladin, ranger, sorcerer, warlock, wizard)
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Touch
Component...
2022-04-07 19:29:08 +0000 UTC
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One of the best parts of Darkest Dungeon, Pillars of Eternity, and a lot of other RPG video games is building up your home base town over the course of your many adventures. I’m not really talking about giving the town itself a numerical level that scales up, though that’s a great idea if you’re handling domain management at the scale of a duchy or smallish kingdom.
Sidebar: What you’d get from leveling up a whole town is different fro...
2022-04-01 04:13:34 +0000 UTC
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Today I want to tell you about a Kickstarter that Sharang Biswas is running. He’s writing flash fiction queer erotica about six of the D&D classes in this first volume of the Tome of Dark Delights. I’ve read the previews of the Bard, Paladin, and Cleric stories, and if you have any interest in queer erotica (primarily mlm so far, though I have no idea what’s yet ...
2022-03-14 22:21:22 +0000 UTC
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A few days ago on Twitter, I got to talking about the warlock class of 3.5e’s Complete Arcane, with some remarks that I’ll repeat here as a prelude to offering some new Eldritch Invocations that center on eldritch blast.
“Narratively, the warlock has grown so much that one can hardly recognize it - gone are the fiendish-theme-only days. The warlock is...
2022-03-13 05:55:57 +0000 UTC
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