Waterdeep: Dragon Heist is an urban adventure for level 1-5 characters, as well as being a sourcebook for play in the City of Waterdeep. However, it’s not the only adventure release coming from Wizards this year! The second adventure release is the linked product Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage. This one’s for levels 5-20 and covers 23 levels of the great dungeon of Undermountain, … Continue reading Delving Under Waterdeep
Rrakkma is an adventure for 9th-level characters that features a band of gith attempting to stop a plot by the mind flayers. The players get to play the gith, and their characters must explore a stronghold on the plane of Pandemonium before entering the Far Realm for the final confrontation. Written by Christopher Lindsay of Wizards of the Coast and released to WPN stores for … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Rrakkma
Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes has been released in some game stores and on D&D Beyond! Hooray! This is a book that, like Volo’s Guide to Monsters, presents much information about the inhabitants of the D&D world. Its primary focus is on the conflicts between various factions: Demons and Devils – the Blood War Elves and Drow, and all the other elven subraces Dwarves and Duergar … Continue reading A First Look at Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes
In Search of Secrets (DDAL07-12) by Christopher Sniezak is an adventure for level 11-16 characters set in Chult. The adventurers travel to a yuan-ti tomb full of traps to stop a yuan-ti priest and his undead servant from fulfilling the wishes of Dendar, the Night Serpent, the evil god of the snake-people. It’s not a great adventure. This isn’t to say it doesn’t have some … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: In Search of Secrets
My Greyhawk campaign continued this week with an adventure from The Mines of Chult. One of the things I try to do with my Greyhawk game is to run it in semi-sandbox mode. That is, every so often I ask my players what they want to do next. We’d finished the last session with the adventurers saving the town of Brusington from an undead monstrosity, … Continue reading The Mines of Greyhawk
Richard Pett’s Grimalkin is an adventure for 3rd-5th level adventurers set in the Southlands of Kobold Press’s Midgard setting. It is a sequel to Cat and Mouse, but you don’t need to know that adventure to appreciate this one. The basic plot revolves around a hidden tomb that several factions wish to find and loot. Unfortunately, the factions don’t know where the tomb is and … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Grimalkin
If you’ve ever played an old-school dungeon-delve, or a new-school death trap (see Tomb of Annihilation), you’ve likely needed a variety of spells to save you from a horrible fate. Or rather, your horrible fate would have been avoided if you’d had these spells. The current edition of D&D doesn’t require these spells to the same extent as previous editions (notably 3E), but you’re likely … Continue reading The Essential Spells for Dungeon-Delving
In my last post, I described the initial concept of an adventure. The next stage of this adventure is to get into a little more detail as to what the PCs will face. Let’s start with the tomb encounter. This is where the players meet the “recovery specialists” who are trying to loot the tomb before the PCs. I’m building this encounter for 5 PCs … Continue reading Designing an Adventure: Choosing the Monsters
I’ve decided I need to design a new adventure. The “announcement” that the next adventure season of D&D will be in Undermountain has fired my imagination. I’d very much like to design a series of short dungeon adventures detailing undiscovered corners of the megadungeon. So, why not? Okay, the “announcement” didn’t actually say “it’s Undermountain”. It just hinted, very heavily, that Undermountain is next. It’s … Continue reading Designing an Adventure: First Steps
The Dungeon Master’s Guide gives a handy table of sample DCs for skill checks. However, what they don’t tell you is the context in which they should be used. This article explores the potential skill bonuses at various levels of play and suggests DCs to use in various circumstances. First, we need to examine what bonuses the characters have. In a group of adventurers, skill … Continue reading D&D Tips: How to set the Difficulty of Skill Checks
