Over the course of the campaigns I’ve run, my PCs have faced a whole lot of cabals of evil spellcasters. One of those campaigns was an early run of the Dust to Dust setting, and the Blackfeather Order played an important role in both the tabletop game and the LARP. […]
My friend Sean Holland is hosting this month’s RPG Blog Carnival, and his topic is Occult Mysteries and Magic. This topic is, of course, near and dear to my heart in gaming, so I hasten to join in. Now magic in D&D doesn’t have a long history of being all […]
Many fantasy literature settings have their own unique spin on wizards and, at least as important, how wizards interact with one another. In this month’s RPG Blog Carnival, I’d love to hear about your setting’s (or favorite fantasy novel’s) wizards, their society, and what makes them unique. To celebrate my […]
Crown of madness is a spell with excellent theme and, in my view, underwhelming mechanics. In this post, I discuss what I see as the problems, propose an alternate implementation, and explain my reasoning. I have every expectation that this spell has its hardcore supporters, or perhaps just those who oppose […]
Today I have for you a subclass – well, two subclasses, but heavily overlapping – that rely on some setting assumptions about wizards that are definitely not true in all settings. If you’re not already allowing and banning subclasses based on how they fit your campaign’s theme, cosmology, and society, […]
In my History of the Classes column on Tribality.com, I mentioned the idea of running a single-class 5e campaign, permitting only the Paladin class. Rather than leave it there, though, this post explores the potential of each class for a single-class campaign and similar deviations from “normal” party breakdowns. This […]
The other day, I got to talking with a friend about game-running, particularly in a setting for which the game-runner is not the initial creator. This includes LARPs, tabletop games, and for that matter, content development in video games – something most folks will never need to care about, but […]
Some time back, Onyx Path Publishing put out an open call for writers to work on World of Darkness lines. I submitted the following, and since I was not sworn to secrecy on pain of death, I’ve decided that it would make some good blog content. It’s a… kinda weird […]
Quite some time back, I talked about the problems of high-level gameplay in D&D and made an assertion that the concepts weren’t the problem, and that it was easy to scale up to higher fantasy and power on the story front. This assertion was not supported in the comments. It comes […]
Last week’s Legends & Lore post touched briefly on divination magic, sparking an ongoing conversation in the D&D Next community about the application of divination magic in games. This is the kind of conversation that applies across gaming of every kind – tabletop, LARP, video games, occasionally even board games. […]
