Titles and Honors to Award Your PCs

I’ve been a huge fan of Robin Pierson’s History of Byzantium podcast since… whenever I finished listening to Mike Duncan’s The History of Rome (I also talked about Byzantine history here), and the part where Robin explains court titles and the importance of honors to the power dynamics of Eastern […]


LARP Design: Character Creation Goal-Setting

If you’re the kind of person who reads my LARP design posts, you probably already know about Citadel LARP (but I’ll link it just in case). This post isn’t solely about Citadel, though, as I’ve also started playing two other games recently, Alliance Atlanta and Resurgence LARP, and those games […]


Five New Fey Magic Items

It’s been an incredibly busy month, and next month won’t be easing up, so I’m sneaking in under the wire to get a second post up in September. On the plus side, I think it’s all work that is making me a better writer. Because it matters in one or […]


Ten NPC Adventuring Parties

I’ve done a few posts now that are collections of NPCs you can drop into your campaign. I usually do sets of twenty at a time, but since these are going to have more description for each item, and both Patreon and WordPress do awful violence to tables, I’m doing […]


Alternative Keen Mind and Observant Feats 3

Over in Tribality, I’ve posted some initial thoughts on the 2024 Player’s Handbook revised rules. If you haven’t already seen that article, here’s the short version: I like a lot of things, but dislike a substantial number of changes too. Today I’m talking in more detail about the Keen Mind […]


NPC Stat Block: Holy Zealot 2

In my Aurikesh campaign, my PCs are in rebellion against the prince of the domain they live in. I’ve given them the names and brief descriptions of a bunch of the Prince’s inner circle of advisors and military commanders. As much as possible, I wanted these characters to feel like the […]


Six New Magic Items for July 2

It’s been an incredibly busy month here, with several writing commitments and the fundraiser event for Citadel LARP. I look forward to telling you more about those writing projects – an adventure! boss monsters! and more! – but this isn’t that post. Today I’m doing new magic items, half from […]


So You Want To Write a Subclass 4

Let’s get the first thing out of the way: I am not an authority, and I am not the Subclass Design Cops. If you have a design that makes you happy, go with God. This is just a collection of things I’ve either figured out or been taught by people […]


Revised Kagandi Species

My Aurikesh campaign has its own player species – I wrote new mechanics for humans and goblins, and wrote several new species. Only the githyanki PC uses D&D’s official mechanics. One of these new species is kagandi, who are lightly reptilian humanoids. In the narrative they’re as common and “default” […]


Player Holdings in Aurikesh 2

My Aurikesh campaign has 149 sessions under its belt at this point. Fourteen of those sessions are in 2024, which is more than we’ve had in some whole years. The highest-level characters are 11th to 13th level. Because my personal “old-school” is AD&D 2e, as the players reached 9th level […]