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See More »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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
As most of you know, in 4e D&D there is a material called residuum, essentially the same as the various arcane dusts that enchanters create by disenchanting magic items in World of Warcraft. A variant form of residuum shows up in the Vox Machina campaign (Exandra shows a lot of […]
Oh, wow, I haven’t written about LARP design since December, how about that! Anyway, even before that when I talked about active locations in boffer LARPs, I knew I wanted to talk about how to design good wandering monsters for LARPs. Creature narrative, costuming, powers, and deployment are major elements […]
It took me until the quarantine times to do much about the fact that I got a Nintendo Switch for Christmas and dive into Breath of the Wild. In case you started your quarantine and media blackout three years early, Breath of the Wild is a huge open-world game in […]
I don’t know how it goes in your campaigns, but in my 5e campaign, no one is as burdened with cool magic items as the monk. Some of these I designed to be coolest with monk class features, while others were less intentional. A magic spear… well, almost no one […]
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 […]
Ryan Shatford, otherwise known as Paper and Dice (@PaperandDice), offered to convert any monster from 4e to 5e for me, if he hadn’t already covered it. I picked the Secret of Vecna, which was presented as three separate monsters in 4e. I’m posting his excellent conversion work here so that […]
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 […]
