My thoughts on including stat blocks in adventure text are shaped by a lot of very poor examples of how to do so in the third and fourth edition era. Dungeons & Dragons fourth edition used a format that we refer to as the “delve” format. It was premiered in the final days of third edition and presented most encounters on a one or two-page … Continue reading On Stat Blocks and Adventure Presentation
In 2008, much to our surprise, Wizards of the Coast blew up the Forgotten Realms. That’s not literal. Rather, Wizards of the Coast took a setting that had been happily available as a published setting for Dungeons & Dragons since 1987, and decreed that it was now 100 years in the future. Almost everyone you cared about was dead, and the world had significantly changed. … Continue reading Once upon a time, Wizards blew up the Forgotten Realms!
The Magician’s House is an adventure for level 4 characters in which those characters explore – well, I guess you know what they explore. It’s also a 161-page pdf. Those 161 pages cover approximately 19 locations in around 110 pages (some have more than one encounter in them), and then there are a further 50 pages of appendices. It’s not that the areas are insanely … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: The Magician’s House
My local group has just started playing Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus. We began with an hour or so of character creation and background determination before moving into the adventure proper. I consider it fairly important to determine the party’s makeup together. You want a party that can handle the threats that a published adventure throws at them, because you don’t have the same flexibility … Continue reading Running Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus, part 1
The new official D&D Campaign Setting book has been announced – and it is part of the Critical Role campaign world! The Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount is its name, and I know almost nothing about it, except that a lot of people that I have a lot of respect for worked on it. So, it’s likely to be very good. That said, I probably won’t … Continue reading On Using Published Campaign Settings
Infernal Insurgency is an adventure for level 5 to 10 characters set in Avernus and part of the official DDAL line of scenarios. It continues the story from Faces of Fortune. The characters, now they have a base in Avernus, must scout a nearby research and weapons facility run by goblins and lesser devils and then cause enough damage there to draw away forces from … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Infernal Insurgency
Faces of Fortune is an adventure for level 5-10 characters set in Avernus, the first layer of Hell. As the first of the DDAL Season 9 adventures at Tier 2, it has the job of introducing you to Hell and the place that will be your home base for the next few adventures: Mahadi’s Travelling Emporium. Along the way, you get chased by Infernal War … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Faces of Fortune
It’s tricky writing adventures that are easy to prepare. M. T. Black recently posted on Twitter that he wanted to allow DMs to prepare DDAL09-04 in as little as 15 minutes. While most DMs should spend an hour or more prepping a four-hour adventure before they run it, the reality of running adventures in a convention or store setting often means that the DM is … Continue reading On the Importance of Clarity
The Absent-Minded Alchemist is a one-session adventure for first- or second-level characters in an urban setting. The players are hired to deal with rats in a cellar. Unfortunately, they’re not told that the alchemist whose cellar it is has been pouring his failed concoctions down the drain, and that the rats have been magically mutated! The idea of dealing with giant rats in a cellar … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: The Absent-Minded Alchemist
Precious Cargo is a four-hour adventure set in the Moonshae Isles for characters level 1 to 4. It is a DDAL-legal adventure produced by Baldman Games. In the adventure, the characters are asked to help deal with fey bandits active on the High King’s Road. After repulsing the initial attack, the characters travel into the nearby forest, where they must face the hag responsible for … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Precious Cargo
