Add Mystery to Magic Items

This post comes from a conversation with Avantris Entertainment’s Lead Designer, Dan Dillon, the other day. He observed that 3.x and earlier editions of D&D had more secrets and surprises built into its magic items, such as items that initially appeared to be much more common versions, so that the […]

New D&D Species: Mithric Elves and Poison-Fey 2

This species idea comes out of something I probably misheard on Critical Role Season 4. The essential idea is “what if warforged but more elfy… because something in the very involved elven reincarnation lore went awry?” Is this strongly influenced by reading a lot of Murderbot Diaries recently? Who can […]

Weird New Spells: Warmup Round 5

I haven’t done any D&D spell design in… well, quite a lot longer than is normal for me, but I’m about to jump back into it for a paid project, so I thought you might enjoy seeing my warmup round. The fact is, though, 5e has an incredibly rich back […]

Werewolf in hybrid form, with the full moon behind them

5e Lycanthrope Design 7

I’m not sure why this is the case, but 5.0 and 5.5 D&D have really struggled with designing lycanthropes that have anything to do with the supporting fiction or an interesting, exciting fight. In this post, I’m going to dig into what’s wrong and what might work better. I’ll go […]

Once Again with Skill Challenges 1

This is going to be an unpopular opinion in some parts of the internet, but dealing with skill challenges (even if they don’t get called that) in non-D&D games has shown me that 5e’s unstructured approach to skill challenges leaves room for things to go well. This is going to […]

Revised Homunculi and Living Statuary 2

This post is an example of revisiting material I wrote many years ago and updating it to the way I would write it now. Editing, if you will, but more than that, examining how my understanding and the technically correct styles have changed. D&D 5e: The Homunculus | Living Clay […]

Six Necromantic Magic Items to Raise Your Spirits 1

I haven’t written a collection of magic items for this blog since… oh wow, October of 2024. All of my magic item design has gone toward Avantris projects since then, I guess! We’ve been running a bunch of necromantic storylines over in Citadel LARP, and I thought the D&D crowd […]

You Can’t Run Games in Anger

I’ve been formulating this post in my head for years. I hope it helps someone run better, kinder games. Including me—I’m talking about lessons that I have learned the hard way and still struggle with at times. This is mostly for the LARP side, as I’m going to talk about […]

Updated Bastion Special Facilities, Part Three 8

February has been very demanding so far, but we just finished the first Citadel event of Season Two, so I’m taking time to remember that this blog exists and its readers are delightful people who deserve content. Thanks for reading, y’all. I’m about halfway through the list of Special Facilities […]

Two horses in a stable. One seems to be reaching out to touch its nose to the other.

Fantasy Names for Your Delectation 1

I like naming characters things. I like constructing a set of phonemes into something remotely plausible as a fantasy name and using the sense of it to say something about the region. At the same time, I am given to understand that for some people this is a source of […]