D&D 5e: The Veytikka Personality

For the most part, my series on personality features for each race has stuck to official D&D races, with the exception of homunculi. Today, though, I’m tackling one of the races of my own creation: the veytikka. I’ve talked about them a good bit in the past, and I’ll repost […]


alchemist, alchemy

D&D 5e: Alchemical Experimentation

The new Unearthed Arcana article yesterday offered a 20-level artificer class, and I wrote a detailed breakdown over in Tribality. (If you’re not also reading my Tribality material, I’ve taken to doing all of my Unearthed Arcana commentary over there.) I mentioned my dissatisfaction with the absence of any active […]


D&D 5e: Alternate Threat Tracks 2

D&D’s Exhaustion condition is a six-level track, starting at a mild penalty and ending up in death. I really like what they’ve done here and how it intersects with the overland exploration system. Dehydration or starvation are really the main ways you ever go from Exhaustion 5 to Exhaustion 6, […]

suspicion, Tangled, Eugene, Wanted

D&D 5e: Way of the Silver Chain Monastic Tradition 2

The recent Unearthed Arcana article of new monastic traditions, which I examined in detail over in Tribality, was the kick in the pants I needed to work on developing another of my own. The monk’s meditative nature makes it a good fit for a subclass about dreams and astral travel, much as […]


D&D 5e: Giant Death’s-Heads

New kinds of undead never go out of style, right? I hope not, anyway, because this post presents a new kind of undead, with four variants. The PCs in my campaign were wandering through the sewers under the city they live in when they ran into some undead, including a […]


A Sixth Year of Blogging

I’m now completing six years of writing this blog. This year is on track to equal or very slightly surpass last year’s post total, even with the weekly column I’ve been writing for Tribality. This has been a momentous year for me in gaming and writing: I’ve gotten fairly steady freelance […]


D&D 5e: The Thri-Kreen Personality 1

Not too long ago, I wrote that I thought I was coming to the end of this series of posts. Then a reader reminded me of all the races I hadn’t touched on yet – slightly further from the beaten path, but still popular enough to merit a full post of […]

The 4e thri-kreen

Emotional Play in Games

This post is a reaction to Bluestockings’s Be Vulnerable: Emotional Play and Toxic Masculinity. I’ve been chewing on it for a few days, and I find that there are important things it doesn’t say, solely relative to my own gaming space. Nothing you read here is going to reject anyone else’s […]


LARP Design: Ritualism 2

The final three-day event of the Dust to Dust LARP campaign ran last weekend. Dust to Dust has been a part of my life since 2006, and even though it has to end, I still have a hard time believing that it is done. I’ll probably be writing a lot […]

Ritual Rune

D&D 5e: The Drow Personality

You know, when I wrote the first post in this whole series, I said straight out that I wasn’t going to do separate posts for subraces, which was absolutely about my stomach-turning reluctance to try to write drow personalities that are remotely playable in group environments (but aren’t all clones […]