My breakdown of elven personality, with traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws, was kindly received, so I have moved on to dwarves. This is still some serious easy-mode of stereotypes, but even halflings are a less-trodden ground than elves and dwarves in fantasy. As before, I’ve made no effort here to […]
In the Unearthed Arcana playtest document that included the minotaur race, the designers included traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws specific to the race, which proved to be a great way to present ready-to-play stereotypes of the minotaurs. (Remember, kids: stereotyping is awful in Real Life, but when used correctly, it is immensely […]
This is an idea I’ve been meaning to write up for awhile. The two Paths of the Barbarian class are cool, and the Totem Barbarian can be a lot of different things… like a really good melee ranger, thanks to some really stylish options. I’m sorry, rangers. Your lives are […]
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted magic items I created for my Aurikesh campaign, so I’m posting a bunch of them now. The first four of these, my PCs have just learned that they have, thanks to identify; the fifth is out there somewhere in the setting, and might or […]
A conversation sprang up yesterday in my blog post about the Royal Sorcerer origin subclass. In that conversation, I was correctly called out for some shoddy design. Specifically, I gave the royal sorcerer the ability to make the friends cantrip cover its tracks with 100% effectiveness. This isn’t a good idea, […]
It’s a new month, so there’s a new Unearthed Arcana. This time out, they’re revisiting the idea of 5e set in a modern world, which came up some months ago in another post. Specifically, they’re dealing with spellcasting classes reworked for the modern world. Now, I don’t have a whole […]
The RPG Blog Carnival for July is about Weapons of Legend, a topic that is near and dear to my heart. In Dust to Dust, there are eleven living weapons of immense power. In D&D terms, you’d call them artifact-level weapons, and not wussy artifacts, either. There are also Named […]
The new playtest packet for the Mystic class – known in other editions as the Psionicist – went up on the Wizards of the Coast website today in Unearthed Arcana. Since I’m also working on an edition-by-edition exploration of psionics over in Tribality right now, I’m primed to be excited […]
In my campaign, I recently introduced warlocks serving the Nightwalker, my setting’s version of the Grim Reaper. The PCs have known they would eventually run into such warlocks, but this is the first time it has happened. Obviously, that meant I had to write a new Patron option for the […]
Over in Google Plusville, +Levi Kornelsen mentioned the absence of a magic item economy in 5e. This is a core design assumption on WotC’s part, and they haven’t been shy about it. In most settings I agree with this choice, but in his post he’s specifically talking about Eberron. That setting gets to […]
