domains - feats - monsters - magic items - spells - patrons - and more
See More »Since Sam Dillon and I just finished our conversation on 2e’s Complete Book of Necromancers in Edition Wars, I felt inspired to write some high-level necromancy spells. CBoN has several, though more than a few of them are so niche in effect that I’m not trying for direct translation. Might […]
In a recent post, I drew a side-view map of the Ruby Talon Deeps dungeon, with essentially no other description. At the time it was just about enjoying drawing and getting something out of my head so that I could get to my paying work. Today I’m revisiting it to […]
This yearly update is the closest this blog gets to personal rather than game content or commentary. Eleven years, and this is the blog’s 496th published post. Not too bad – though I’m vain enough to be sad that my daily pageviews have dropped off by about 30%. Maybe someday […]
I’m finally getting around to writing in detail about an idea I proposed over in Tribality, in my Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything breakdown. This is a mechanical framework for processes that don’t end when you reduce one or more targets to 0 hit points – maybe there’s also combat going […]
Freelance adventure writing requires map-drawing, even when a real cartographer is going to come along and draw a much better map for the final release. (Thank God for real gaming cartographers.) Anyway, I drew this map for practice, to help me make cooler crappy first draft maps. I’ve always loved […]
In conversation with Mystech, he suggested that mage hand was simply the only surviving spell among many mage [body part] cantrips. I went straight from there to “mage hand is an echo of the power of Vecna on Oerth,” so that implies the existence of a mage eye cantrip, a […]
With that rather… quotidian title, I’m launching into what promises to be the biggest midstream change in all of 5e. (We’re not really looking for something else to top this.) During the Future of D&D panel, they discussed the fact that NPC stat blocks are losing the big beefy spell […]
To be honest, this post is a palate cleanse in the midst of a longer writing project. A friend of mine who suffers from polymorphous light eruption thought it sounded like a D&D spell and agreed that I should turn it into one, and since I’m not going to write […]
The post from a few weeks ago about new healing spells for D&D sparked a conversation about new healing approaches for LARPing. In this case, I’m mostly interested in the hit-location based LARPs that I’m playing – hit point games are fine if that’s your thing, but I’m not the […]
A little while back, I wrote about villainous schemes for immortality, working from the Villain’s Scheme table in Chapter 4 of the DMG. The point of this exercise is to think about the different tiers of play and how the higher tiers expand the scope and stakes. Especially if you […]
