As part of my intermittent series of magic items, this time I’m presenting five new magic bows, ranging (heh) from rare to artifact. Aethershred comes from the Dust to Dust campaign, while the stormbow, bone bow, and Baron Ystorin’s spine bow all come from the Wildlands South campaign. Whisper is a sort of convoluted cross-campaign […]
D&D’s Exhaustion condition is a six-level track, starting at a mild penalty and ending up in death. I really like what they’ve done here and how it intersects with the overland exploration system. Dehydration or starvation are really the main ways you ever go from Exhaustion 5 to Exhaustion 6, […]
There are two little paragraphs in the 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide, plus three bullet points, that offer a wonderful amount of room for expansion: Training, p. 231. In the 4th edition Dungeon Master’s Guide II, there are a few pages on Alternative Rewards, and the group I played 4e with […]
This post is directed toward players in LARPs that have NPCs who are not full-time members of Staff. That includes both folks who are volunteering for the whole event and never play a PC, and folks who are doing just a few hours’ shift backstage. There’s probably a lot of […]
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 […]
This past weekend marked the thirteenth weekend-long event of Dust to Dust, so I want to talk about what goes into filling out an event’s schedule. Now, there are a ton of valid ways to approach this; the one that works for you is necessarily correct. I’m just talking about […]
LARP-running has any number of challenges that tabletop gaming can’t reasonably face. The specific case I want to talk about today is module parties. I assume modules aren’t a significant part of salon LARPs, though of the three salon LARPs I’ve played, two included adventure sequences outside of the main area […]
When it comes to structuring a robust lore game, many games include knowledge or lore skills. These skills serve, on one level, as background: a character-sheet indication of who the character is and what she does. On another, they represent a path for additional exposition. In some games and to […]
It’s hard to explore the full background of my motivation for this post, but it is most recently triggered by an assertion in the comments thread of another blog that I read. (Note: I’ve now been working on this post for about two weeks, since well before the recent DtD […]
About a week ago, I wrote a few words about the function of divination in tabletop gaming. As is common in this blog, I’m coming back to discuss how the same idea works in live-action gaming. Just like every other time I’ve posted about LARPing, I’m really talking about the […]
