Back in my Enchantment Under the Sea post, I created a spell called gemscribe. It got me thinking about other interesting things to do with crystals in spellcasting (as opposed to, say, making ioun stones with them). I haven’t figured out where any of these might get polished up (get […]
For Under the Seas of Vodari, we’re creating several kaiju-like ultra-powerful monsters. They’re commonly known to exist, but to be bound in slumber by the bards of the College of Deep Dreamers. Their awakening is an ever-present threat in the setting. In this post, I’m creating lore and stats for […]
Let me get something out of the way: this isn’t going to be a review, for two reasons. One, I’m so far behind in my review backlog on the tabletop RPG side that I obviously don’t have time to write a review for something in a whole other medium of […]
As I was settling into bed the other night, the mental image of the staff of the planar tear popped into my mind and wouldn’t go away. I thought you might enjoy seeing stats for that, as well as two more staves. Since I love doing “and one more thing” […]
As another piece of my work on Under the Seas of Vodari, I’m writing some new spells. We’ll see how it turns out, but my intention going in is to create things that work above the surface just as well as underwater. No actual enchantments in this list yet, I’m […]
There’s a lot of commentary online about speeding up D&D fights by tweaking the math – decreasing enemy hit points and increasing damage output. To be blunt, I think this is all wrong-headed, as long as the monster you’re using isn’t poorly designed from the start. (I did just have […]
As you may know, we’re working on “Under the Seas of Vodari,” a Kickstarter stretch goal supplement for Seas of Vodari. D&D has rules for magical interactions underwater, but if all or much of the campaign takes place there, maybe you want to cut out things that underwater spellcasters never […]
As most of you know, in 4e D&D there is a material called residuum, essentially the same as the various arcane dusts that enchanters create by disenchanting magic items in World of Warcraft. A variant form of residuum shows up in the Vox Machina campaign (Exandra shows a lot of […]
Oh, wow, I haven’t written about LARP design since December, how about that! Anyway, even before that when I talked about active locations in boffer LARPs, I knew I wanted to talk about how to design good wandering monsters for LARPs. Creature narrative, costuming, powers, and deployment are major elements […]
It took me until the quarantine times to do much about the fact that I got a Nintendo Switch for Christmas and dive into Breath of the Wild. In case you started your quarantine and media blackout three years early, Breath of the Wild is a huge open-world game in […]
