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See More »This isn’t my first post of magic items for 5e, though it is the first since the release of the DMG. As I’ve discussed before, I love some of the new levers we see in 5e magic item design. The magic items of the DMG are, by majority, the traditional […]
This post is directed toward players in LARPs that have NPCs who are not full-time members of Staff. That includes both folks who are volunteering for the whole event and never play a PC, and folks who are doing just a few hours’ shift backstage. There’s probably a lot of […]
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been thinking about how to build an Investigator rogue. Since I woke up ridiculously early this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, I now have an initial draft of the Investigator archetype to share. The goal of this archetype is to […]
There I was, thumbing through the 5e Player’s Handbook (as one does), when I came a suggestion that non-criminal members of the Rogue class include investigators. Well, I like a good procedural mystery as much as anyone, so pondered how you’d play an investigator through the Rogue class. The baseline Rogue abilities […]
I’ve been perusing the adventure included in the D&D 5e Starter Set, “Lost Mine of Phandelver,” with intent to commit heinous acts of game-running. I would guess that about 33% of the folks reading this blog post have also read the adventure, since I’ve heard so much commentary on it […]
The fey are one of the few areas of the 5e Monster Manual in which the lore is disappointing. Of course, there aren’t all that many fey in the first place: blink dogs, dryads, green hags, pixies, sea hags, satyrs, and sprites. To my mind, this contrasts sharply with the implied […]
It’s four years now that I’ve been writing this blog. I’ve just passed 250 published posts. Considering that I average more than two thousand words per post, I conservatively estimate half a million words, and possibly closer to twice that. Every year of writing has slightly fewer posts than the […]
I’m surprised by how much I like the design space of feats in 5e, and how different they are in function and concept from 3.x and 4e. Somewhere or other I saw them described as small chunks of multiclassing, and that is about right; in this they’ve preserved some of […]
Some time back, a reader asked about starting up sneaky characters in LARPs, especially when you are new (to whatever degree) to that game’s community. Characters who telegraph that they are untrustworthy are tough to begin with, but when you tack on having no established OOC relationships, it’s all the […]
The D&D 5e Monster Manual has been out for awhile now, and it is 95% goddamn amazing. I want to get that out of the way, because this is a discussion of one of its problem areas. Seriously, though, it has a great variety of monsters, excellent artwork, a reasonable level […]
