This is going to be a sort of unusual series, as I’ll be brainstorming and gradually creating the text of an adventure that… after editing… I plan to sell. You know, much like how the rest of my Tribality Publishing releases were Harbinger posts first? Anyway, the goal is first […]
A recent conversation over in the social medias (join my Dungeons & Dragons 5e group in MeWe) with Cam Banks has me thinking about other takes on elves. In particular, he was looking for lower-magic elves with no cantrips or teleports. There’s not a lot of official content that points […]
Quite a while back, a friend suggested that he’d like to see a post on how to run good time-travel stories in roleplaying games. I’m finally writing one – if not an exhaustive guide, then five pointers to make your time travel adventure as cool as possible. I’ve always loved […]
I’ve been reading a bunch of Ars Magica 5th Edition lately – make sure you check out Samhaine’s Rules Summary posts – and it got me thinking about the interesting Stuff in a wizard’s laboratory. Going on adventures and spending downtime to do nothing but improve your laboratory is a completely valid campaign-long […]
I’ve been digging into Waterdeep: Dragon Heist like a whole lot of 5e fans right now. I think this book acknowledges and incorporates the Spellplague more than any other adventure we’ve seen so far, which is to say any – but I haven’t read every adventure and may have missed things. There’s […]
“Instigator” may not appear in the seminal Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering, but it has been recognized as a significant player type for a long time all the same. Today I want to talk about how GMs, and especially LARP game runners, can engage this kind of player, and a […]
Sure, In the Company of Giants (5th edition, Revised) has been out for nine months and I’m just now getting around to writing a design diary. Today I’m going to talk about it a bit. The first thing to understand is that I was hired to write a revision of an earlier […]
In a recent conversation with the inimitable Samhaine, we discussed having PCs lead the overland escape of a large group of NPCs – think of it as the Fellowship shepherding the people of Rohan from Meduseld to Helm’s Deep, the travelogue format of zombie horror, or the terrestrial version of […]
For the same project as the Cultist background, I’m creating another close variant on the acolyte, but on the opposite, more enforcing side of the social order. Inquisitors work about equally well as crusading heroes or the authority to rebel against. Figure out which side is the underdog in your setting, and […]
From the moment I read about the mechanic of light and dark tokens in Chill 3rd Edition, it had a death-grip on my imagination like few other mechanics before or since. I finally got a copy of Chill 3e for my birthday, so I can examine the game’s implementation in more detail. […]
