The D&D 5e Monster Manual has been out for awhile now, and it is 95% goddamn amazing. I want to get that out of the way, because this is a discussion of one of its problem areas. Seriously, though, it has a great variety of monsters, excellent artwork, a reasonable level […]
For my Aurikesh campaign setting, I scrapped the core 5e races and wrote new racial abilities. I am pretty much fine with 5e’s rules for elves, dwarves, halflings, and the less common races, but they weren’t what I wanted for Aurikesh. As I’ve mentioned before, I really don’t like the […]
In the first two posts of this series, I’ve discussed the history of the ranger class from OD&D to 2e, along with the peripheral additions that splatbooks added to it. Now that I have a little writing time again, I’m going to see if I can wrap up 3.x through […]
In my last post, I looked back to the ranger class of OD&D, 1e, and 2e. When I started that post, I had the now-comical notion that I might discuss all six editions at once. The tale, as the Professor and GRRM have been known to say, grew in the telling, […]
So I have this ongoing difference of opinion with Kainenchen over the ranger class, as a shorthand for the whole system of having more than four classes. Does D&D need more classes than cleric, fighter, rogue, and wizard? Can all other important class concepts be represented by some multi-class combination […]
I’m working on a new subclass for rangers, focused on snares and cunning use of terrain. Working toward that end, I’ve created five new spells for rangers, and as the druid spell list is largely (though not strictly) a superset of the ranger spell list, I think these spells are appropriate […]
In my (now long-running) D&D Next/5e game, the players explored a dungeon called the Monastery of the Blessed Scroll (layout based on Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire). I run very few dungeons that take much more than 2-3 sessions at most to explore, so this post documents what I did, and […]
During the public playtest of D&D Next, I did some fiddling around with the sorcerer class to keep it current-ish with later packets, because several of my players were so intrigued by the original class concept. My efforts weren’t great, in part because they highlighted what was wrong in the […]
A few days ago, the G+ thread following +Rob Donoghue‘s post on Rangers and Rogues led to an idea that really grabbed me: the Mastermind Rogue. This is a Roguish Archetype that roughly parallels some of the functions of the Bard and the assisting functions of the Battle Master archetype. For […]
In my campaign, the Bounty Hunter background in the playtest documents was one of the more popular options. Since the setting runs more toward late-Renaissance and early-colonial rather than the core medieval setting of most campaigns, players used that background to cover slightly more modern law-enforcement concepts as well. The […]
