D&D’s Exhaustion condition is a six-level track, starting at a mild penalty and ending up in death. I really like what they’ve done here and how it intersects with the overland exploration system. Dehydration or starvation are really the main ways you ever go from Exhaustion 5 to Exhaustion 6, […]
The recent Unearthed Arcana article of new monastic traditions, which I examined in detail over in Tribality, was the kick in the pants I needed to work on developing another of my own. The monk’s meditative nature makes it a good fit for a subclass about dreams and astral travel, much as […]
New kinds of undead never go out of style, right? I hope not, anyway, because this post presents a new kind of undead, with four variants. The PCs in my campaign were wandering through the sewers under the city they live in when they ran into some undead, including a […]
I’m now completing six years of writing this blog. This year is on track to equal or very slightly surpass last year’s post total, even with the weekly column I’ve been writing for Tribality. This has been a momentous year for me in gaming and writing: I’ve gotten fairly steady freelance […]
Not too long ago, I wrote that I thought I was coming to the end of this series of posts. Then a reader reminded me of all the races I hadn’t touched on yet – slightly further from the beaten path, but still popular enough to merit a full post of […]
This post is a reaction to Bluestockings’s Be Vulnerable: Emotional Play and Toxic Masculinity. I’ve been chewing on it for a few days, and I find that there are important things it doesn’t say, solely relative to my own gaming space. Nothing you read here is going to reject anyone else’s […]
The final three-day event of the Dust to Dust LARP campaign ran last weekend. Dust to Dust has been a part of my life since 2006, and even though it has to end, I still have a hard time believing that it is done. I’ll probably be writing a lot […]
You know, when I wrote the first post in this whole series, I said straight out that I wasn’t going to do separate posts for subraces, which was absolutely about my stomach-turning reluctance to try to write drow personalities that are remotely playable in group environments (but aren’t all clones […]
The ghoul has long been one of my favorite types of D&D undead. It doesn’t even matter that the original ghul of Arabian folklore is a demon instead. Cannibalism – especially a compulsion to commit same – is a kind of horror that seriously unsettles me, so I love stories about […]
I’ve been writing a series on personality features for each individual non-human race for awhile now, and today – thanks to a request from a reader – I’m covering kobolds, one of the only remotely PC-playable races that even goblins can look down on. The lore around kobolds has changed a […]
