Ruby Talon Deeps Map 4

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 […]


Vecna’s Spellbook 6

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 […]


Spellcasting and NPC Stat Blocks 6

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 […]


September Spell Collection 1

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 […]


LARP Design: Healing in Hit Location Games 2

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 […]


Kenneth Branagh as Iago and Laurence Fishburne as Othello from the 1995 film

Villain’s Schemes: Influence 1

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 […]


Eight New Healing Spells 2

Stands-in-the-Fire started a conversation over in Twitter about healing gameplay styles. Now, he’s talking about a lot more than D&D 5e there, but there are enough great ideas floating around in the thread that I wanted to write a bunch of new healing spells. A lot of the thread focused […]


The “Pious” Warlock, Part Four 7

Oh hey, it’s been a really long time since I’ve touched this series. I’ve done a ton of Planescape reading, between Hellbound and Faces of Evil. There’s enough there that I haven’t really scratched that surface yet, but I’m plowing ahead. That’s the power of CHAOS, baby! Because today, I’m […]


D&D 5e: House Rules 2021 7

At the request of a reader and for the general convenience of my players, this is an update to the Aurikesh house rules. It’s been five years, and I’ve had time to see the effects of things in play. Character Generation 4d6 drop lowest for one column. Roll 2d6 for […]


Villain Schemes: Immortality 4

In a recent episode of Edition Wars, I got to talk to DM Samuel, Kainenchen, and Stands in the Fire about Chapter 4 of the 5e DMG. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about a very short chapter, which is about what you’d expect from Edition Wars. It left me with a […]