New Wizard School: Bloodbinding 7

This is another rough draft of a subclass for Under the Seas of Vodari, the upcoming aquatic campaign setting that expands on the Seas of Vodari setting. Thanks to, you know, the whole spellbook thing, coming up with exciting and thematically relevant wizard concepts poses certain challenges. This is what […]


A Tenth Year of Blogging 4

Did you know that it’s been only one year since the last time I did one of these? That doesn’t sound right to me either. It’s been an incredibly rough year for me getting regular content into the Patreon and the blog – and the same for my Tribality column, […]


The “Pious” Warlock, Part One 9

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 […]


Visual concept for Starjewel

Five Gemstone Spells 3

Back in my Enchantment Under the Sea post, I created a spell called gemscribe. It got me thinking about other interesting things to do with crystals in spellcasting (as opposed to, say, making ioun stones with them). I haven’t figured out where any of these might get polished up (get […]


Dokahi’s Brood: Rhaluq the Many 4

For Under the Seas of Vodari, we’re creating several kaiju-like ultra-powerful monsters. They’re commonly known to exist, but to be bound in slumber by the bards of the College of Deep Dreamers. Their awakening is an ever-present threat in the setting. In this post, I’m creating lore and stats for […]


Aeon’s End Second Edition 3

Let me get something out of the way: this isn’t going to be a review, for two reasons. One, I’m so far behind in my review backlog on the tabletop RPG side that I obviously don’t have time to write a review for something in a whole other medium of […]


Three Planar Staves and a Very Special Dagger 2

As I was settling into bed the other night, the mental image of the staff of the planar tear popped into my mind and wouldn’t go away. I thought you might enjoy seeing stats for that, as well as two more staves. Since I love doing “and one more thing” […]


D&D 5e: Enchantment Under the Sea 3

As another piece of my work on Under the Seas of Vodari, I’m writing some new spells. We’ll see how it turns out, but my intention going in is to create things that work above the surface just as well as underwater. No actual enchantments in this list yet, I’m […]


Five Tricks to Fix That Fight Flow 7

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 […]


Underwater Spellcasting

As you may know, we’re working on “Under the Seas of Vodari,” a Kickstarter stretch goal supplement for Seas of Vodari. D&D has rules for magical interactions underwater, but if all or much of the campaign takes place there, maybe you want to cut out things that underwater spellcasters never […]