I don’t have any great gift for rendering a visual description in my GMing narration – I can get the idea across, but really making players feel, smell, or taste the fetid stench of this week’s dungeon is just not something I do well. Among other things, this is because […]
I’ve talked about villain design in this blog before, but now that the Dust to Dust campaign is over, I want to use them as case studies in that conversation. In my view, DtD’s major villains were one of the most-right things that we did. This is not “in comparison […]
I’m very happy to announce that the Kaiju Codex is now available from Rite Publishing on DriveThruRPG. I have converted this product to the fifth edition of the world’s most popular roleplaying game, from Pathfinder rules. In this PDF, you’ll find stats, stories, and roleplaying notes for 20 different kaiju, as […]
I like creepy monsters with unsettling concepts or visuals as much as anyone, so I was thrilled when I was asked to stat out and expand upon the Alchemist Testing Apparatus, the Ledgerman, and the Red Leech Tide. These monsters were designed for J.M. Perkins’s Salt in Wounds Setting; click here to learn […]
I recently ran a playtest session of Over the Edge’s 25th Anniversary Edition. OtE has been my wife’s very favoritest game since we picked up the 1992 edition some years back, so when we heard there was going to be a new version, of course we were thrilled. This post […]
The idea of henchmen NPCs in a D&D party goes all the way back to the earliest games, and was most recently part of official release in D&D 4e. Now, 5e characters are not all that complicated at low levels, but there are still a few more moving parts than one […]
I’ve talked many times in this blog about the format of my Aurikesh campaign, but today I want to dig into it in detail, both for its strengths and its weaknesses. The fundamental format isn’t in any way unique to Aurikesh; from what I have read, it seems to have […]
I recently finished a playthrough of Tyranny by Obsidian Entertainment. I was a huge fan (and Kickstarter backer) of Pillars of Eternity, so once I heard about Tyranny, I knew it was going to be for me. Tyranny also has a lot in common, thematically, with Stardock Entertainment’s Sorcerer King, which […]
A little while back, I posted a collection of magic spears (and a magic helmet), and a reader requested a similar collection for maces. Another reader requested that I cover magic bows, and that’s also on my to-do list. Some of these weapons I treat as specifically needing to be […]
There’s a widespread acknowledgement, I believe, that the initiative rules found in D&D, and indeed in most games, are not great and even detract from the game, but they are the least-worst option available. In this post I’m going to talk a bit about the problems with the current model […]
