One thing that greatly irritates me about Pathfinder is the plethora of conditional modifiers. There are usually very good game-world reasons for those modifiers, but the more of them there are, the harder it gets to keep track of everything. I just noticed one of them in the latest blog entry on PF2, Secrets of Alchemy. Now, thematically this is a fantastic item. It’s very … Continue reading Pathfinder II – Modifier Madness
The Paizo team put out a blog entry recently about how they’re handling spells for Pathfinder II. I though I’d say a few words on what their approach means for the game. Caveat: I’m not a fan of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. This will come out in this article. I think that if you enjoy Pathfinder, you’re an excellent person who should keep playing games … Continue reading Thoughts on Pathfinder Playtest Spells
My game of Storm King’s Thunder has just begun Chapter 4. Most of the session was the adventurers meeting Harshnag and travelling to the Oracle, with just the opening part of the exploration. This was a three-hour session. With breaks, we probably got in about 150 minutes of play. In that time, we had the following encounters: Meet Harshnag and aid him against 6 Hill … Continue reading Running Storm King’s Thunder – Fast and Deadly Combats
When I was at university – so many years ago – a game was released based on the works of Roger Zelazny. Called Amber Diceless Roleplaying, it cast the player characters as the sons and daughters of an immortal, immensely powerful family, who were basically gods. The interesting thing about the game was that the characters didn’t like each other that much. The game was … Continue reading Things I learnt from Amber Diceless Roleplaying
One of the tricky things to do with high-tier adventures, particularly ones for the D&D Adventurers League, is to make them feel significant enough. Demagogue, the first of the Sovereignty trilogy from Baldman Games, succeeds at this brilliantly. Bane, the God of Tyranny, has kidnapped the candidates for rulership of Phlan and has begun to indoctrinate them in his way of ruling. As this would … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Demagogue
The Mines of Chult is a collection of nine short adventures set in – wait for it – Chult! Written by three of my favourite D&D designers, Shawn Merwin, Tony Petrecca and Jeff C. Stevens, the nine adventures provide challenges for your adventurers to face when they discover one of the mines hidden away in the jungle. As these mines are not described in the … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: The Mines of Chult
My current campaign of Storm King’s Thunder is run using the D&D Adventurers League rules. One of the aspects of those rules is that I can’t use milestones. XP must come from the players overcoming monsters, whether through negotiation or combat and set XP awards in the text. In the case of SKT, it’s almost entirely overcoming monsters. The little quests in the adventure don’t … Continue reading Running Storm King’s Thunder – Wilderness Encounters in Chapter 3
As you may already know, I spent the Easter long weekend down in Melbourne, running and organising D&D Adventurers League games at the Conquest games convention. It was the first time I’d managed to get to the convention since the early 1990s; I’d planned to attend a couple of years ago, but an inconvenient bushfire almost destroyed our house about a month prior, but finally, … Continue reading Running Dungeons & Dragons at Conventions
In this chapter, it’s all about the pacing. The end of Chapter 2 gives the adventurers several adventure hooks; missions suggested by the NPCs they’ve saved that give treasure and other rewards. Chapter 3 is the “sandbox” chapter, where the players can explore the Sword Coast doing little missions on the way. It’s all very Baldur’s Gate. The DM’s role here is to maintain the … Continue reading Running Storm King’s Thunder: Chapter 3
In my last article, I talked about the importance of the overall structure of campaign adventures. It’s very hard to run an adventure when you don’t understand the steps the characters must take to navigate their way through it. Each adventure has its own structure, and some have multiple paths. Hoard of the Dragon Queen is relatively straight-forward. However, there’s a couple of areas that … Continue reading Hoard of the Dragon Queen – Adventure Structure
