I’ve been a huge fan of Robin Pierson’s History of Byzantium podcast since… whenever I finished listening to Mike Duncan’s The History of Rome (I also talked about Byzantine history here), and the part where Robin explains court titles and the importance of honors to the power dynamics of Eastern […]
It’s been one week under a year since my last post in this series, and a big freelance project means I’ve been awfully quietly lately. It’s almost done, though, and I promise a return to form in February and March. This time, I’m talking about how a Mayhem villain scheme […]
It’s been over a year since my last post in the Villain’s Schemes series, but since it’s gotten a lot harder in the last week to write D&D content with confidence, I’m just writing about stories and antagonists now – even if it’s using the 5e DMG for its backbone. […]
I got the first draft of a major project done, so I’m giving some time to more bounty-hunting content. Writing and talking about the UA 2022: Expert Classes document has me thinking about feat design, so I’m starting with a Bounty Hunter feat. After all, in a bounty hunting campaign, […]
One of my big takeaways from the release of Spelljammer: Adventures in Spaaaaace (there’s a misprint in the books and on the slipcase where Spaaaaace is missing four of its a’s, I don’t know what to tell you) is that while bounty-hunting adventures are great in a lot of settings, […]
A little while back, I wrote about villainous schemes for immortality, working from the Villain’s Scheme table in Chapter 4 of the DMG. The point of this exercise is to think about the different tiers of play and how the higher tiers expand the scope and stakes. Especially if you […]
In a recent episode of Edition Wars, I got to talk to DM Samuel, Kainenchen, and Stands in the Fire about Chapter 4 of the 5e DMG. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about a very short chapter, which is about what you’d expect from Edition Wars. It left me with a […]
In a recent blog post, Sly Flourish talks about 1st level as the high-water mark for danger in 5e. This sparked a conversation about danger and difficulty levels in 5e more generally. I also follow the excellent Jennifer Scheurle on Twitter, who wrote this article on difficulty in video games, […]
This is one of those posts that I’ve talked about writing for awhile now, and I expect that a whole lot of people will disagree most vehemently with everything I say – in one direction or the other. It’s fine, folks. My comment section welcomes you as long as we all […]
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 […]
