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See More »Let’s get the first thing out of the way: I am not an authority, and I am not the Subclass Design Cops. If you have a design that makes you happy, go with God. This is just a collection of things I’ve either figured out or been taught by people […]
My Aurikesh campaign has its own player species – I wrote new mechanics for humans and goblins, and wrote several new species. Only the githyanki PC uses D&D’s official mechanics. One of these new species is kagandi, who are lightly reptilian humanoids. In the narrative they’re as common and “default” […]
My Aurikesh campaign has 149 sessions under its belt at this point. Fourteen of those sessions are in 2024, which is more than we’ve had in some whole years. The highest-level characters are 11th to 13th level. Because my personal “old-school” is AD&D 2e, as the players reached 9th level […]
In the misty past of… exactly nine years ago… I wrote a Divine Trickster roguish archetype for a friend of mine to play in the Reborn campaign. That version is highly specialized toward that setting’s pantheon, but also – my grasp of subclass design has changed over the years. For […]
I haven’t created a new collection of magic items in a bit, so what if I just share with you a bunch of things I’ve created for my Aurikesh and Dragon Heist (now long post-Heist – we just continued the campaign with them doing their own thing) campaigns? Spells with […]
Thanks to some great questions from a reader, I have a whole series of new LARP design posts to write, which brings me great joy. In this one, I’ll be talking about specific puzzle types and applications of puzzles in campaign-length boffer LARPs – the only LARP style I’m really […]
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 […]
In circling back to a long-dormant project, I’m creating a swath of new stat blocks for were-creatures. The general goal is to keep were-creatures in active use at higher tiers of gameplay. The MM lycanthropes are woefully ineffective, unless you can’t hurt them at all, in which case the fight […]
Not too long ago, I finally had a reason to pay closer attention to the spell Alter Self. I’m talking about the 2014 version; I have no foreknowledge of whether it’ll see meaningful change in 2024’s revised Player’s Handbook. Anyway, this spell is pretty underwhelming, along a bunch of vectors. […]
For another project, I’m working on research mechanics, and I thought it might be interesting and fun to create a stable of researchers and scholars that you can drop into the narrative on short notice. Maybe the PCs need someone to interact with while they’re hitting the books at an […]
