Arcana Unleashed Breakdown, Part One 2

It has been ages since I’ve written a breakdown post. Yesterday, though, I picked up a copy of Arcana Unleashed and AU: Deadfall from Tyche’s Games in Athens, GA, and I realized I miss the practice. This book is intended for all D&D settings, while using Alustriel Silverhand for its […]

Standard (non-collector) cover image of Arcana Unleashed. Depicts Alustriel Silverhand floating in air with her staff raised, casting a spell. She looks focused and powerful.

Twenty Merchants and Their Wares

I’ve really enjoyed creating collections of briefly summarized NPCs (see previous entries below!), and today I’m doing merchants. Whether you’re running a shopping session or an investigation in a fantasy version of the Marrakesh Night Market, these might be useful for making the place feel real, lived-in, and just a […]

Birthright: Revolution

A few days ago in Bluesky, some of my favorite folks were discussing their deep affection for the 2e Birthright setting. If you’ve read this blog for any great length of time, you know that I too am a devotee of Birthright, and co-DMed a BR campaign with Kainenchen for […]

Six New Archfey Spells 4

My wife has been playing Ileskku, an Archfey warlock, as one of her two main characters in Aurikesh since 2012, and a lot of my tweaks to the warlock class over the years have come from her experience with that character. This time, the issue is that the Warlock spell […]

Higher-CR Gargoyles 4

The Tome Show’s long-running deep dive into each monster of the 5.5 Monster Manual has made me realize how much I miss the higher-CR stat variants that are such a big part of the 4e MMs. I’m also aware of a recent release on the DM’s Guild, “More Monsters,” that […]

Add Mystery to Magic Items 5

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 […]

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 […]

Werewolf in hybrid form, with the full moon behind them

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 […]