This July marks seven years since the release of D&D 5e, though it feels like even longer than that since I’m still running the same campaign I started in D&D Next, with several original PCs still involved. That’s quite a respectable lifespan for a WotC edition of D&D, considering...
2021-02-13 05:58:36 +0000 UTC View PostOkay, we’ve moved out of the fey in this discussion of warlock patrons and the Piety mechanic. Sure, 5e canon indicates that some Archfey are outside the Summer and Gloaming Courts, but I’m more interested in covering a lot of different warlocks pretty well than in covering every Archfey warl...
2021-01-22 04:07:07 +0000 UTC View PostIt’s been a long time since I’ve talked LARP design. Quarantine has of course put games on hold for the last year, though as vaccines roll out, we might be stirring again from that long slumber. Anyway, in this post I’m talking about field battle models and implementation guidance for your ...
2021-01-05 18:17:39 +0000 UTC View PostToday I’m back to continue my series adapting the Piety and Iconoclast systems from Mythic Odysseys of Theros to the relationship between warlocks and their patrons. In the first article (linked below), I hashed out Seelie/Summer Court Archfey. This time, I’m giving Unseelie/Gloaming...
2020-12-22 19:38:27 +0000 UTC View PostThis is another rough draft of a subclass for Under the Seas of Vodari, the upcoming aquatic campaign setting that expands on the Seas of Vodari setting. Thanks to, you know, the whole spellbook thing, coming up with exciting and thematically relevant wizard concepts poses certain challenges. Thi...
2020-11-23 16:43:23 +0000 UTC View PostDid you know that it’s been only one year since the last time I did one of these? That doesn’t sound right to me either. It’s been an incredibly rough year for me getting regular content into the Patreon 2020-11-20 03:22:31 +0000 UTC View Post
A tweet by @jorphdan about adapting the Piety system from Mythic Odysseys of Theros into the Forgotten Realms sparked the idea of using the Piety system to reward warlocks for their loyalty to their Patrons. One of my narrative issues with the warlock class is that there aren’t 2020-11-15 23:18:15 +0000 UTC View Post
Back in my Enchantment Under the Sea post, I created a spell called gemscribe. It got me thinking about other interesting things to do with gems or crystals in spellcasting (as opposed ...
2020-10-10 06:43:05 +0000 UTC View PostFor 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 st...
2020-10-01 04:50:01 +0000 UTC View PostLet 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 ri...
2020-09-15 13:30:09 +0000 UTC View PostAs 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 it...
2020-08-28 03:57:45 +0000 UTC View PostAs 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. 2020-08-08 15:14:38 +0000 UTC View Post
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 2020-07-22 19:20:40 +0000 UTC View Post
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 the...
2020-07-08 02:19:14 +0000 UTC View PostOver 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 ha...
2020-06-29 04:04:09 +0000 UTC View PostAs 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 in...
2020-06-11 16:45:50 +0000 UTC View PostOh, 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...
2020-05-27 19:51:35 +0000 UTC View PostLet'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,...
2020-05-21 14:47:32 +0000 UTC View PostIt 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 Ze...
2020-05-21 04:55:00 +0000 UTC View PostThanks 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...
2020-04-30 19:09:21 +0000 UTC View PostHey, 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 ...
2020-04-27 04:11:49 +0000 UTC View PostBack 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’...
2020-04-01 03:25:45 +0000 UTC View PostIn 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? Anywa...
2020-02-29 20:14:10 +0000 UTC View PostIn 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-gree...
2020-02-21 18:02:38 +0000 UTC View PostNow 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 w...
2020-02-16 06:13:13 +0000 UTC View PostI 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...
2020-01-28 03:40:54 +0000 UTC View Post
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 t...
2020-01-11 05:13:35 +0000 UTC View Post
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 a...
2019-12-31 06:09:34 +0000 UTC View PostTreasured 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 do...
2019-12-02 06:08:49 +0000 UTC View PostThis 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 ...
2019-11-17 23:24:16 +0000 UTC View Post