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 the LARP that I work on, one of the races available to players is the Homunculus. It’s less like D&D homunculi and more like Frankenstein’s Monster; as with Shelley’s original, they are fully sentient. Within the setting, they are widely abused and mistreated by their wizardly creators, though some […]
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted magic items I created for my Aurikesh campaign, so I’m posting a bunch of them now. The first four of these, my PCs have just learned that they have, thanks to identify; the fifth is out there somewhere in the setting, and might or […]
The RPG Blog Carnival for July is about Weapons of Legend, a topic that is near and dear to my heart. In Dust to Dust, there are eleven living weapons of immense power. In D&D terms, you’d call them artifact-level weapons, and not wussy artifacts, either. There are also Named […]
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 fey are one of the few areas of the 5e Monster Manual in which the lore is disappointing. Of course, there aren’t all that many fey in the first place: blink dogs, dryads, green hags, pixies, sea hags, satyrs, and sprites. To my mind, this contrasts sharply with the implied […]
O sages standing in God’s holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. –W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” Okay, I’ll fess up – this isn’t a post about how to use […]
Like every edition of D&D before it, D&D Next (which will really just be called D&D; it will be up to the fans to call it Fifth Edition for clarity) draws a line between arcane magic and divine magic, a separation that has informed a huge number of settings in […]
Once Dust to Dust ends, I will need a long break from running LARPs. Possibly permanent, but who knows? The point is that this post is just something I have to write to get it out of my head: a LARP setting and approach to game-running that are quite different […]
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 […]
