In the new UA packet, the Create Spell spell requires expensive material components that are consumed on use: an arcane focus worth 1000 gp per level of the spell you’re creating. In my breakdown article on it, I pondered what a 9,000-gp arcane focus even looks like, if you’re not […]
At 2:45 am on Saturday, September 17, my Dragon Heist group finished the published adventure. It’s not the end of the campaign, just the official material. We’ll be having further conversations about their goals and what comes next, but this seems like a good time to look at what worked […]
Edited to Add: The incredible Aaron Good actually recorded a performance of this song. It is an unholy abomination and I am delighted beyond words. And now it’s time for “Silly Songs with Dalamar,” the part of the show where Dalamar comes out and sings a silly song. Joining Dalamar […]
I’ve been talking to Kainenchen a lot lately about the Forgotten Realms canon around surface elves and drow, which has changed a whole lot between the time I first learned it (2e) and now. For a better breakdown of that canon – including trouble spots – check out G.A. Barber’s […]
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 […]
I’ve recently started a Forgotten Realms campaign with Kainenchen and two of our friends, Sam and Ryan. Sam created a tabaxi ranger, planning to go for the Beast Master conclave. (Conclaves are cooler than archetypes, as a descriptor, so I’m running with it.) She has only a little 5e experience, […]
In this post I’m returning to my series on villain design and implementation, this time to talk about The Rise of Tiamat. It is, of course, the follow-up to Hoard of the Dragon Queen, but it’s also quite sensibly presented in its own book, because the two arcs are entirely dissimilar in […]
In the same vein as my post on Villain Design in Dust to Dust, today I’m tackling the first hardback adventure series released for 5e: Hoard of the Dragon Queen. Spoiler warning, I am going to be talking in detail about who the villains are, their motives, and the adventure’s […]
You know, when I wrote the first post in this whole series, I said straight out that I wasn’t going to do separate posts for subraces, which was absolutely about my stomach-turning reluctance to try to write drow personalities that are remotely playable in group environments (but aren’t all clones […]
It’s been awhile, but I have an ongoing series in this blog where I dig deeper into the non-human races of D&D and give them tables of traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws, as additional or replacement options for the personality features of their Backgrounds. We come now to the dragonborn, […]
