Beginning this Monday, we’ll be starting our play through of Shadow of the Dragon Queen. For those unaware of the adventure, it was released in December 2022, and is the first official adventure in a long time to be set in the Dragonlance setting. I delighted in the original Dragonlance novels and adventures, so exploring the new take on the story is exciting for me … Continue reading Preparing for Shadow of the Dragon Queen
If you’re writing a D&D adventure, one of the things you’re probably not thinking about is “Are the characters using flying in this adventure”. Unless you’re doing an adventure for your home group, and you know they will be. Most of the times when you buy a published adventure, it also doesn’t consider “do the characters fly?” What effect does that have on the adventure? … Continue reading The Perils of Flying and Adventure Design
Dungeons & Dragons has some of the weirdest, most inconsistent approaches to how it defines its new editions. There are very few games that have changed that much over the years, but the number of changes aren’t quite reflected in the edition numbering. It doesn’t help that there were two different strands of D&D for a decade. Changes in the game have been big and … Continue reading What makes a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons?
Wizards of the Coast have put out several big campaign adventures for D&D. And many of them left some DMs wondering “How the eff do I run that?” It’s important to note that this feeling is not confined to their products. It’s true of every adventure publisher, but people are most likely to have seen those big campaign adventures for D&D. I believe that some … Continue reading Adventures, Designer Assumptions, and GM Capabilities
In the forty-odd years, I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons, most of the magic items I give out come from the core rulebooks. There are several reasons for this, mainly because I often use random magic item tables rather than selecting items to match the characters. The random tables typically only exist in the core book. And it becomes very hard when the magic items are … Continue reading Supplement Review: Vault of Magic
Area 1. Entrance Chamber (30 ft. square) Stone steps lead down from the ruins above to this chamber. An iron door, scratched and dented, stands in the middle of the opposite wall. The floor is likewise scratched and scored, and dried blood covers a lot of it. In the corners of the room, broken crossbow bolts and bits of metal rust away. The gnomes and … Continue reading Dungeon 23: Area 1 – Entrance Chamber
The Queen of Spades is a Dungeons & Dragons adventure for level 7 characters that should last from eight to sixteen hours. At its heart, it is an investigative adventure set in the Forgotten Realms, where the heroes must face a force of chaos and – especially – bad luck. The adventure does a lot of things very right. I am particularly impressed by how … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: The Queen of Spades
Warriors of Krynn is not the game I was expecting. When I heard that the new Dragonlance adventure, Shadow of the Dragon Queen, was getting a supplementary board game for resolving the clashes between armies, I though that it would be about, you know, battles between armies. It isn’t. Well, it is, but that’s in the background. Instead, it’s about the actions of the heroes … Continue reading Warriors of Krynn – First Impressions
G’day, folks! I know I haven’t been blogging much recently – and also my presence on Twitter has taken a nose dive. I would love to say that it’s because I’ve been working on wonderful projects that I’ll share with all of you, but it’s more a case of finding a few other things to occupy myself. Some of them are boring (work), but others … Continue reading Still Alive!
Today’s session was a 3-hour delve in to the seventh level of Joseph Bloch’s “Castle of the Mad Archmage“, which I’ve been using as the basis of my Castle Greyhawk campaign. For the seventh level of the dungeon, there are some seriously underpowered monsters here. I know it’s an old school dungeon, but even so, you’d expect better foes than “1 zombie” or “2 skeletons”, … Continue reading Exploring the Crypt level of “Castle of the Mad Archmage”
