On Sunday, 19 February, I ran the 122nd session of the Aurikesh campaign, in which the PCs gathered a rag-tag fleet of ships and led it against the blockade at the mouth of the river that leads to their city. I used the same essential approach here as in the […]
On Saturday, 22 October, 2022, I ran the 117th session of my Aurikesh campaign. I was trying some unusual stuff mechanically, and in this post, I’m going to talk about what worked, what didn’t, and how I could improve the concept. We all know that getting mass combat to work […]
There’s a lot of commentary online about speeding up D&D fights by tweaking the math – decreasing enemy hit points and increasing damage output. To be blunt, I think this is all wrong-headed, as long as the monster you’re using isn’t poorly designed from the start. (I did just have […]
A bit more than two years ago, I posted the Way of the Silver Chain monastic tradition. I showed it to several friends recently and got some great feedback, leaving me completely dissatisfied with its original conception. I like to think that I’ve learned a lot about subclass design over […]
Last weekend’s D&D game ended in the biggest boss fight of the campaign – a fight that has been coming since it started six years ago, and that the players learned was coming around two and a half years ago (36 sessions ago), and have been actively preparing to fight […]
Sure, In the Company of Giants (5th edition, Revised) has been out for nine months and I’m just now getting around to writing a design diary. Today I’m going to talk about it a bit. The first thing to understand is that I was hired to write a revision of an earlier […]
This past weekend, I ran the follow-up session of a modest dungeon exploration in my Aurikesh campaign. It was the conclusion of an adventure that led a team of five PCs into the midst of two regiments clashing, and it ended in the PCs recruiting a powerful new asset to […]
I’ve talked about villain design in this blog before, but now that the Dust to Dust campaign is over, I want to use them as case studies in that conversation. In my view, DtD’s major villains were one of the most-right things that we did. This is not “in comparison […]
Over the past few weekends, I’ve had the great fortune to play in three D&D sessions and run one. Each of these sessions wound up with a centerpiece battle, and I want to look at the different setups, uses of tension, and some statting issues that arose. These were all […]
The final three-day event of the Dust to Dust LARP campaign ran last weekend. Dust to Dust has been a part of my life since 2006, and even though it has to end, I still have a hard time believing that it is done. I’ll probably be writing a lot […]
