domains - feats - monsters - magic items - spells - patrons - and more
See More »Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been playing a new iOS game called Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas. I play a lot of things I don’t care about, and this isn’t a dedicated review blog, so if I’m bothering to post a review, then spoiler: I liked it. It’s not a […]
Dear Design Diary, While I was away for Thanksgiving, thanks to the unflagging support of Kainenchen, I started working with some ideas for a new fantasy roleplaying system for tabletop. I particularly want something that borrows a bit more from the style and substance of LARPing, without sacrificing usability. When […]
There are a lot of lessons of good game-running that carry over between tabletop and live-action gaming. This post, though, concerns itself with an area in which the two are quite different. As usual, I’m talking about a certain band of LARPing, not all LARPing. (There are almost no statements that […]
This is my third Anniversary Post for Harbinger of Doom. Its predecessors are here and here. In these posts it is my custom to talk about the games I’m running and playing, since I otherwise largely abjure blogging about matters of normal life. Much like when I started this blog […]
It’s been a long time now since I first cracked the cover of Skyrealms of Jorune and began my detailed examination of this famously strange game. It’s been a pretty slow news week on the D&D Next front, what can I say? So here we are, in Chapter Two (Creating Your […]
With a lot of my posts about game design, I talk separately about how things work in tabletop games and live-action games. When I came to the topic of lore skills, I first discussed how they work in a number of local LARPs, because I feel like LARPs have a […]
When it comes to structuring a robust lore game, many games include knowledge or lore skills. These skills serve, on one level, as background: a character-sheet indication of who the character is and what she does. On another, they represent a path for additional exposition. In some games and to […]
The final-final update to the playtest packet offers a second paladin oath (apparently this is where they’re storing the avenger class now?), some tweaks to paladin spell DCs (not paralleled in the ranger, for whatever reason), and a huge revision to Wild Shape and the Circle of the Moon, over […]
“You can ride without a saddle, Lord?” he asked me.“Without a horse, tonight, if necessary.”—Excalibur, by Bernard Cornwell In my recent post on the latest playtest packet, I wrote about skills and proficiencies a lot. I thought about it some more, and now I want to recapitulate and, for my […]
Back in March, I was playing a lot of Torchlight II, and I created an Outlander class for D&D Next, because arcane archers and creepy gunslingers are awesome as hell. Now that we have the last D&D Next rules set we’re going to get until actual publication (presumably), I’m updating […]
