This isn’t my first post of magic items for 5e, though it is the first since the release of the DMG. As I’ve discussed before, I love some of the new levers we see in 5e magic item design. The magic items of the DMG are, by majority, the traditional […]
The fey are one of the few areas of the 5e Monster Manual in which the lore is disappointing. Of course, there aren’t all that many fey in the first place: blink dogs, dryads, green hags, pixies, sea hags, satyrs, and sprites. To my mind, this contrasts sharply with the implied […]
I’m surprised by how much I like the design space of feats in 5e, and how different they are in function and concept from 3.x and 4e. Somewhere or other I saw them described as small chunks of multiclassing, and that is about right; in this they’ve preserved some of […]
For my Aurikesh campaign setting, I scrapped the core 5e races and wrote new racial abilities. I am pretty much fine with 5e’s rules for elves, dwarves, halflings, and the less common races, but they weren’t what I wanted for Aurikesh. As I’ve mentioned before, I really don’t like the […]
In my (now long-running) D&D Next/5e game, the players explored a dungeon called the Monastery of the Blessed Scroll (layout based on Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire). I run very few dungeons that take much more than 2-3 sessions at most to explore, so this post documents what I did, and […]
During the public playtest of D&D Next, I did some fiddling around with the sorcerer class to keep it current-ish with later packets, because several of my players were so intrigued by the original class concept. My efforts weren’t great, in part because they highlighted what was wrong in the […]
In my campaign, the Bounty Hunter background in the playtest documents was one of the more popular options. Since the setting runs more toward late-Renaissance and early-colonial rather than the core medieval setting of most campaigns, players used that background to cover slightly more modern law-enforcement concepts as well. The […]
Like every edition of D&D before it, D&D Next (which will really just be called D&D; it will be up to the fans to call it Fifth Edition for clarity) draws a line between arcane magic and divine magic, a separation that has informed a huge number of settings in […]
In a recent Legends & Lore post, Mearls explored some of the thought behind magic item design in the new edition of D&D, particularly with regard to attunement. I’ve seen this post take some flak in other circles, but I think it has a ton of potential and I’m really […]
Now that I’ve created or modified four classes for D&D Next (the alchemist, outlander, sorcerer, and warlock), I want to take a step back and consider what’s working, what isn’t, and a few new ideas I’ve had for future classes. It isn’t that I want each campaign to have a […]
