The Trouble with Capturing Adventurers

One of the great tropes in adventure fiction is capturing the protagonist and letting him find a way to escape. Unfortunately, requiring the capture of adventurers is extremely problematic in the middle of a game of Dungeons & Dragons. It is something that needs to be very carefully handled. The problem derives from the nature of D&D. The essence of the game is that you … Continue reading The Trouble with Capturing Adventurers

5E Adventure Review: Fear of the Dark

Karl Resch’s adventure, Fear of the Dark, is set in the time of the Rage of Demons, where madness and fear stalk the Underdark. The plot of the adventure is simple: A Zhentarim caravan has gone missing underground, and the adventurers must find out what has happened to it by exploring an outpost overrun by invaders. For the most part, it’s a standard dungeon crawl, … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Fear of the Dark

5E Adventure Review: Weapon on the Wall

Weapon on the Wall is the first product of Kelnas. It’s a 5-hour adventure for 2nd-4th level characters, and it has some interesting ideas in it. It also suffers greatly from how it introduces the adventure. The major problem is that the hook to the adventure is that there’s this very special weapon (denoted as “Weapon” in the text) that hangs on the wall of … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Weapon on the Wall

On the Art of Improvisation

One of the most important skills in the Dungeon Master’s toolbox is the ability to improvise. And, based on my long experience with the game, it’s a skill that takes time to develop. Like most skills, you get better at improvisation by actually improvising, and paying attention to what your players think of the result. Many of the games I’ve run have been improvised. Even … Continue reading On the Art of Improvisation

Introducing Dungeons & Dragons Through in-Store Play

One of my delights in life is introducing the game of Dungeons & Dragons to new players, who then discover that it’s something they want to play again. In this quest, my local gaming store has become integral to the process of acquiring new players. We run D&D Adventurers League games at the store every Wednesday and Saturday evening. The games are a mixture of … Continue reading Introducing Dungeons & Dragons Through in-Store Play

5E Adventure Review: Mad Mage’s Mansion

Vladimir Arabadzhi’s Mad Mage’s Mansion is a four-hour adventure for two characters of levels 1-2, and is presented as a 33-page pdf file. He describes it as a “small party adventure”, and such things are a rarity – and useful for a DM who has a couple of players who want to play a game, but can’t find more players! In the case of only … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Mad Mage’s Mansion

5E Adventure Review: The Claw of Winter

The Claw of Winter is an adventure for 8th-level characters written by John Prichard. It is set in the kingdom of Cormyr in the Forgotten Realms. The presentation of the adventure draws very heavily that of the D&D Adventurers League adventures, even to having a similar format of rewards, monster statistics and encounters. It even includes downtime days and renown, although this is not an … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: The Claw of Winter

D&D Player Tips: Paying Attention

One of the things that occasionally occurs in Dungeons & Dragons games is an outbreak of player arrogance. The belief that the player characters are the biggest, baddest people in the game, and that nothing can touch them. This often ends very badly for the player characters. I’ve been playing D&D for a very long time, and many of my early games were played with … Continue reading D&D Player Tips: Paying Attention

AD&D Review: Mordenkainen’s Fantastic Adventure

The earliest days of Dungeons & Dragons saw Gary Gygax run many people through his Greyhawk campaigns, including a young Rob Kuntz. Rob, being something of an inventive sort, soon became a Dungeon Master himself. He DMed Gary through a number of games – giving the creator of D&D a chance to play the game he’d invented rather than just running it. One particular adventure … Continue reading AD&D Review: Mordenkainen’s Fantastic Adventure

New Players and the Slow Release Schedule of Dungeons & Dragons

It is with some surprise that I find that I’ve been running the Dungeons & Dragons organised play at Guf Ballarat for the past six years. It began slowly, but now we typically have somewhere between 20 and 40 people playing with us on a weekly basis, coming to one or other of the D&D nights we hold or, for some players, both. We get … Continue reading New Players and the Slow Release Schedule of Dungeons & Dragons