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
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
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
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
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
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
The tenth adventure of Misty Fortunes and Absent Hearts is The Artifact by Teos “Alphastream” Abadia. This is a fascinating adventure, which rewards players who like role-playing and investigation as opposed to straight combat. It’s also based on the classic game of Clue. (Did you know they once produced a D&D version of Clue? They did! Really!) This is not to say that The Artifact … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: The Artifact
When you run a game of Dungeons & Dragons, the intention should be to make it enjoyable for everyone at the table. The players and the Dungeon Master. There’s little point in running the game if you’re hating every minute of it, and if the players aren’t enjoying it, why should they come back for another game? This is especially important when running D&D Adventurers … Continue reading DM Tips: Making the Game Enjoyable for New Players
The ninth adventure in the fourth D&D Adventurers League season, The Tempter, has a lot to recommend it. It makes use of a number of gothic horror tropes that I adore, and it ends with the players having to make a decision that properly evokes the major theme of the adventure: Temptation. The characters might be sent to a Lady’s manor to bargain for supplies, … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: The Tempter
Life’s been a little crazy recently, so while D&D games have continued, blog updates have not. Many apologies for that! When we last saw our brave band of adventurers, they were heading off to Vallaki to find a wedding dress for the Abbot’s “Bride of Strahd”, but as it turned out, they decided to go back to the Wizard of Wines winery to pick up … Continue reading Running Curse of Strahd, part 4 – Yester Hill
