William Brandes Stoddard

Artificer Specialist: Bloodcrafter

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 dir...

Twenty Crewmates for the High Seas

Whether you’re using Seas of Vodari and Tribality’s 2023-03-29 17:19:22 +0000 UTC View Post

Gunpowder Traps

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...

Session Postmortem: The Battle of the Blockade

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 2023-02-20 20:27:16 +0000 UTC View Post

Six New Magic Flintlocks

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 ...

Villain’s Schemes: Magic

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 i...

One Leak

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...

Gunslinger Archetype: Deadeye

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 ...

One D&D: New Holy Orders

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 f...

A Twelfth Year of Blogging

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 ...

Dungeon Fatigue and Its Solutions

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�...

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 pass on my perspective and wha...

Session Postmortem: The Battle of Leonor’s Hill

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 ...

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

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 l...

Bounty Hunters: A Feat, Clients, and Rivals

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 ...

Adventure Postmortem: Dragon Heist

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 w...

Ruby Talon Deeps: Locations 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 ...

Bounty-Hunting Stories

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 ...

Great Old Ones of Aurikesh

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 l...

The “Pious” Warlock, Part Five

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.

2022-07-29 19:54:30 +0000 UTC View Post

Under the Seas of Vodari: Weird Locations and Adventure Hooks

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...

LARP Design: Dungeon Setup

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 se...

Oath of Hospitality Paladin

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 las...

Magic Items from Malevolent Stars

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 s...

Five New Witchy Spells

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)<...