Design Diary: 5e Domain Rulership 15

If you followed my History of Domain Rulership over in Tribality, which ran from March of 2016 to January of 2017, I mentioned there that I was going to try to build my own ideal domain rulership system for 5e. In this post, I’m showing the work as I go. […]


D&D 5e: Witch Bolt Rework 2

I still see a lot of conversation around the spell witch bolt, so I want to talk about why it’s bad in both straightforward math and in likely tactical situations. I’m also going to talk about easy fixes, possibly in multiple versions, just as I’ve done with a few other […]


Photo Friday: Sea Chest (Funadansu) 2

I don’t think I’m going too far afield to say that a closed box is one of the the great symbols of adventure. Two others that spring to mind are a map and a closed door. This image is Sea Chest, with the alternate title Funadansu, from the Los Angeles […]


Villain Design: Hoard of the Dragon Queen 9

In the same vein as my post on Villain Design in Dust to Dust, today I’m tackling the first hardback adventure series released for 5e: Hoard of the Dragon Queen. Spoiler warning, I am going to be talking in detail about who the villains are, their motives, and the adventure’s […]


Photo Friday: Entrance to the Heaven

I don’t have any great gift for rendering a visual description in my GMing narration – I can get the idea across, but really making players feel, smell, or taste the fetid stench of this week’s dungeon is just not something I do well. Among other things, this is because […]


Villain Design in Dust to Dust

I’ve talked about villain design in this blog before, but now that the Dust to Dust campaign is over, I want to use them as case studies in that conversation. In my view, DtD’s major villains were one of the most-right things that we did. This is not “in comparison […]


Kaiju Codex

I’m very happy to announce that the Kaiju Codex is now available from Rite Publishing on DriveThruRPG. I have converted this product to the fifth edition of the world’s most popular roleplaying game, from Pathfinder rules. In this PDF, you’ll find stats, stories, and roleplaying notes for 20 different kaiju, as […]


Three Monsters of Salt-in-Wounds 1

I like creepy monsters with unsettling concepts or visuals as much as anyone, so I was thrilled when I was asked to stat out and expand upon the Alchemist Testing Apparatus, the Ledgerman, and the Red Leech Tide. These monsters were designed for J.M. Perkins’s Salt in Wounds Setting; click here to learn […]


Over the Edge 25th Anniversary Edition Playtest

I recently ran a playtest session of Over the Edge’s 25th Anniversary Edition. OtE has been my wife’s very favoritest game since we picked up the 1992 edition some years back, so when we heard there was going to be a new version, of course we were thrilled. This post […]


D&D 5e: Companion NPCs 4

The idea of henchmen NPCs in a D&D party goes all the way back to the earliest games, and was most recently part of official release in D&D 4e. Now, 5e characters are not all that complicated at low levels, but there are still a few more moving parts than one […]