domains - feats - monsters - magic items - spells - patrons - and more
See More »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 […]
Blog friends! I’ve missed you, and I’ve missed creating collections of magic items to entertain and delight you. Today I bring you rings of power, none of them to be used lightly. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay Angelic Ring Ring, very rare (requires attunement) The setting of this gold […]
It’s been one week under a year since my last post in this series, and a big freelance project means I’ve been awfully quietly lately. It’s almost done, though, and I promise a return to form in February and March. This time, I’m talking about how a Mayhem villain scheme […]
Now that Under the Seas of Vodari is in the hands of (what I hope is) an adoring public, we’re putting together a Patreon for ongoing setting support. Think of this blog post as me doing some writing warm-ups, getting back into the mindset of the surface regions of the […]
