In circling back to a long-dormant project, I’m creating a swath of new stat blocks for were-creatures. The general goal is to keep were-creatures in active use at higher tiers of gameplay. The MM lycanthropes are woefully ineffective, unless you can’t hurt them at all, in which case the fight […]
For one of my freelance projects, I submitted a hefty list of new monsters, and the project lead picked a goodly number of them. In this post I’m writing about one that didn’t make the cut, just because I thought it was an interesting idea. It’s a re-imagining of one […]
Oh, wow, I haven’t written about LARP design since December, how about that! Anyway, even before that when I talked about active locations in boffer LARPs, I knew I wanted to talk about how to design good wandering monsters for LARPs. Creature narrative, costuming, powers, and deployment are major elements […]
Ryan Shatford, otherwise known as Paper and Dice (@PaperandDice), offered to convert any monster from 4e to 5e for me, if he hadn’t already covered it. I picked the Secret of Vecna, which was presented as three separate monsters in 4e. I’m posting his excellent conversion work here so that […]
This past weekend, I ran the follow-up session of a modest dungeon exploration in my Aurikesh campaign. It was the conclusion of an adventure that led a team of five PCs into the midst of two regiments clashing, and it ended in the PCs recruiting a powerful new asset to […]
I like creepy monsters with unsettling concepts or visuals as much as anyone, so I was thrilled when I was asked to stat out and expand upon the Alchemist Testing Apparatus, the Ledgerman, and the Red Leech Tide. These monsters were designed for J.M. Perkins’s Salt in Wounds Setting; click here to learn […]
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 […]
The ghoul has long been one of my favorite types of D&D undead. It doesn’t even matter that the original ghul of Arabian folklore is a demon instead. Cannibalism – especially a compulsion to commit same – is a kind of horror that seriously unsettles me, so I love stories about […]
Okay, I don’t know how many of you played Bungie’s excellent Myth series of turn-based tactical games, with releases in 1997, 1998, and 2001. Judging by the fact that the series hasn’t seen a release since 2001, I’m going with “not enough of you.” I don’t pretend that I was skilled […]
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 […]
