William Brandes Stoddard

Dokahi’s Brood: Rhaluq the Many

For Under the Seas of Vodari, we’re creating several kaiju-like ultra-powerful monsters. They’re commonly known to exist, but to be bound in slumber by the bards of the College of Deep Dreamers. Their awakening is an ever-present threat in the setting. In this post, I’m creating lore and stats for the one I named Rhaluq the Many. As I start, I have only the very vaguest concept - let's see where this goes.

Rhaluq the Many

Rhaluq is the newest form...

Aeon’s End Second Edition

Let me get something out of the way: this isn’t going to be a review, for two reasons. One, I’m so far behind in my review backlog on the tabletop RPG side that I obviously don’t have time to write a review for something in a whole other medium of gaming, don’t be ridiculous. Two, I don’t know if I can be usefully objective about this board game. I don’t play a ton of board games, though we spent Labor Day weekend on nothing else.

2020-09-15 13:30:09 +0000 UTC View Post

Three Planar Staves and a Very Special Dagger

As I was settling into bed the other night, the mental image of the staff of the planar tear popped into my mind and wouldn’t go away. I thought you might enjoy seeing stats for that, as well as two more staves. Since I love doing “and one more thing” for my collections of magic items, I created… well, a very special dagger that its owner would really like back.

Staff of the Planar Tear

Staff, very rare (requires attunement)

This ...

D&D 5e: Enchantment Under the Sea

As another piece of my work on Under the Seas of Vodari, I’m writing some new spells. We’ll see how it turns out, but my intention going in is to create things that work above the surface just as well as underwater.

Sorry, no actual enchantments in this list. I just needed the title.

Encrust Creature

2nd-level transmutation

Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Touch
Components: V, S
...

Five Tricks to Fix That Fight Flow

 There’s a lot of commentary online about speeding up D&D fights by tweaking the math – decreasing enemy hit points and increasing damage output. To be blunt, I think this is all wrong-headed, as long as the monster you’re using isn’t poorly designed from the start. (I did just have a nasty run-in, from the DM side, with a poorly-designed monster, but that’s another story.) What you need to do is change things up mid-fight. In this post, I’m looking at five stron...

Underwater Spellcasting

 As you may know, I'm working on “Under the Seas of Vodari,” a Kickstarter stretch goal supplement for Seas of Vodari, along with a few other members of the Tribality team.. D&D has rules for magical interactions underwater, but if all or much of the campaign takes place there, maybe you want to cut out things that underwater spellcasters never would bothered to hand down from generation to generation. 

Ground Rules

· I’m only cover...

A Brain Dump of Fey Content

Over in Twitter, I decided to promote "Fey Gifts & Bargains" with a megathread - for each Like, RT, or new purchase of the PDF, I'd write one tweet of fey NPCs, story hooks, locations, magic items, or whatever. This is the work in progress - the tweet blown up a bit, so it's much less than halfway done. (Also the PDF just hit Electrum Best Seller!)

 I'm posting this here for the benefit of non- or rare Twitter users, and because I'm very unlikely to get another post up between ...

Bringing Residuum to 5e

As most of you know, in 4e D&D there is a material called residuum, essentially the same as the various arcane dusts that enchanters create by disenchanting magic items in World of Warcraft. A variant form of residuum shows up in the Vox Machina campaign (Exandra shows a lot of 4e influence), but otherwise it’s not a part of D&D 5e as far as I know.

In 4e, characters can use the Disenchant Magic Item ritual to convert it into residuum equal to 20% of its gold piece va...

LARP Design: Wandering Monster Design

Oh, wow, I haven’t written about LARP design since December, how about that! Anyway, even before that when I talked about active locations in boffer LARPs, I knew I wanted to talk about how to design good wandering monsters for LARPs. Creature narrative, costuming, powers, and deployment are major elements that I plan to cover. (If your game doesn’t have wan...

Fey Gifts and Bargains

Let's try this again - it's much the same document as last time, but with expanded content and a few more revisions. Many thanks to Stephen Cheney (editor), Dave Jumaquio (layout), and Shawn Ellsworth for making this possible. It should go up on the DM's Guild shortly.

There are, of course, tons of PDFs about fey bargains on the DM's Guild. There are no fully original ideas, and we're all kind of drawing from the same well. I hope you'll find that what I'm offering is accessible, inspir...

Five Lessons from Breath of the Wild

It took me until the quarantine times to do much about the fact that I got a Nintendo Switch for Christmas and dive into Breath of the Wild. In case you started your quarantine and media blackout three years early, Breath of the Wild is a huge open-world game in the Legend of Zelda franchise, and it’s incredibly good. I’m having a good enough time exploring the world that I’m holding off on going after Ganon, because I’m pretty sure I’ll stop playing the game once ...

Fey Bargains

Thanks to the heroic efforts of Stephen Cheney, Dave Jumaquio, and Shawn Ellsworth, my Fey Bargains PDF is going on the DM's Guild today, in time to join the upcoming Play It Forward program. It is Tribality Publishing's first DM's Guild release.

What Would You Give For Power? 

Beauty, dreadful power, and solemn promises: these...

2020-04-30 19:09:21 +0000 UTC View Post

New Magic Items for Monks

Hey, all! I'm sorry content has been so slow in the past couple of months - I sent in my final draft on a project, so I've just gotten a lot of my free writing time back.

I don’t know how it goes in your campaigns, but in my 5e campaign, no one is as burdened with cool magic items as the monk. Some of these I designed to be coolest with monk class features, while others were less intentional. A 2020-04-27 04:11:49 +0000 UTC View Post

Additional Fey Charms

 Back in January, I wrote about Fey Contracts, including new charms you can gain from those contracts. In this post, I’m expanding the list of charms, in preparation for turning this into a DM’s Guild release.

Charm of Green Bounty

When you receive this charm, your blood runs green, and tiny flowers sprout in your hair. When your skin is in contact with fertil...

D&D 5e: Goblins with Subraces

In my Aurikesh campaign, the PCs have just gone to a demiplane called the Great Warren, which is purportedly the homeland of the first goblins. It’s tiny and entirely underground – as far as anyone can prove, the Great Warren has no sky. Maybe it is a splinter off of the Plane of Earth? Anyway, they had a three-session adventure there, at the end of which they freed the goblins (and hobgoblins and bugbears) from their overlords. I decided that this opened all three goblinoids should be av...

Dragons of Aurikesh

 In a recent Tribality article, I mentioned that dragons in Aurikesh are (usually) a combination of a chromatic and a metallic dragon type. For instance, there is copper-green dragon that the PCs recently met, fought, killed, negotiated with, and raised, in that order. Anyway, one of my readers asked about it, so I said I’d write a bit more about how it works.&...

Q&A 2

Now that initial editing on Seas of Vodari is finished, I'm happy to return to my Patreon. I have another big project that is about to swallow my time, but I hope I'll have at least one more post coming this month. This time, it's another Q&A series, with many thanks to the readers who contributed questions.

ICV (@CaduceusIV) asks: What is the best/your favorite monster design that you've seen in 5e? WotC or third-party, either one is good.

D&D 5e: Six New Paladin Weapons

I got to thinking about the famous holy avenger swords and how, in 5e, they sort of suggest Oath of Vengeance paladins. Any paladin can use them, of course – even an Oathbreaker, though I imagine paladins everywhere would just as soon have you forget that. Anyway, I thought it might be fun to see what the holiest weapons of the other Oaths look like.

Sword of Holy Devotion

Weapon (any sword), legendary (requires attunement by a paladin)

You gain a +3 bo...

Fey Contracts

The Diabolical Deals section of Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus offers something that… frankly it’s kind of weird that we haven’t seen yet in 5e, where warlock is a core class: bargain-making guidelines. In this post, I’m exploring what a fey version of the same thing would look like. 

The Fey Hierarchy

From the least among sprites, boggans, and pixies to the Archfey and the Eldest, all of the fey have ...

Lair Actions Everywhere

As part of a Very Special Episode of Edition Wars, Sam Dillon and I were talking about 2e's Combat & Tactics, which includes random events at the start of every round that affect individuals or the whole battle area. I realized that in 5e, this could just get implemented as Lair Actions that aren’t targeted by the NPC. On a meta-level, ...

How to Write a Boffer LARP Module

Treasured Patreon backer Ryan McCorkle asked for a guide to writing modules for boffer LARPs. Since I freely acknowledge that there are others out there who can do better at this than I can, I hope the comments section will become a useful resource in its own right. 

For readers who don’t have any background in boffer LARPing, a module or adventure takes a group of players – as few as one, and technically up to all of the players in some unusual circumstances – away from the ...

Q&A

This post comes out of a request from backer Benjamin Ybarra. Many thanks to everyone who contributed questions! If you like this kind of quick-hit content, all you have to do is send me more questions, by whatever means seems best to you.

Tomas Giminez (@TGiminezDM) asks: Which is your best tip for new game designers?

I’m going to mention but largely skip the two normal best pieces of advice – play lots of games in every medium and read widely 2019-11-17 23:24:16 +0000 UTC View Post