The location described below is an idea that I’ve been pondering for awhile now: a relatively safe settlement in the Abyss that PCs can use as a base of operations for adventures in tiers 3 and 4. One of the things about the Abyss is that it can be so […]
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 […]
In a conversation over on a social media site that shall remain nameless, Hannah Rose suggested giving even fairly low-level PCs limited access to teleportation, just as a way to get them to the adventure site and back to town. I don’t want to assume that I know all of […]
Now that Under the Seas of Vodari is in the hands of (what I hope is) an adoring public, we’re putting together a Patreon for ongoing setting support. Think of this blog post as me doing some writing warm-ups, getting back into the mindset of the surface regions of the […]
I’m in the place of loving LARP writing and gamerunning, but not knowing if I’ll ever write or run another game, for reasons of time, energy, and the life commitments of having kids. That’s why I write so many blog posts of LARP design these days – I hope to […]
My homebrew setting supports the Great Old One warlock pact (while hoping for a serious rework of its features in ’24), but doesn’t use HPL’s Mythos entities or (for the most part) the canonical D&D Great Old Ones. Within the setting they’re called the Abominations, and according to legend they […]
Freelance adventure writing requires map-drawing, even when a real cartographer is going to come along and draw a much better map for the final release. (Thank God for real gaming cartographers.) Anyway, I drew this map for practice, to help me make cooler crappy first draft maps. I’ve always loved […]
A tweet by @jorphdan about adapting the Piety system from Mythic Odysseys of Theros into the Forgotten Realms sparked the idea of using the Piety system to reward warlocks for their loyalty to their Patrons. One of my narrative issues with the warlock class is that there aren’t any mechanical […]
Back in January, I wrote about Fey Contracts, including new charms you can gain from those contracts. In this post, I’m expanding the list of charms, in preparation for turning this into a DM’s Guild release. Image: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=727057 Charm of Green Bounty When you receive this charm, your […]
In my Aurikesh campaign, the PCs have just gone to a demiplane called the Great Warren, which is purportedly the homeland of the first goblins. It’s tiny and entirely underground – as far as anyone can prove, the Great Warren has no sky. Maybe it is a splinter off of […]
