After the TPK (Total Party Kill) in Death House, we started playing the full Curse of Strahd adventure. And, of course, things promptly got interesting. Curse in Strahd is an adventure where the players need to deal with a great threat – the vampire Strahd, ruler of Barovia – without initially having the tools to do so. There are a lot of people who think … Continue reading Running Curse of Strahd, part 1
During the last season of the D&D Adventurers League, I created a set of first-level characters that I could give out to new players at conventions and store sessions when we didn’t have enough time to create a character for them. So, now it’s time to start creating another set of characters! This set will be slightly more advanced than the first set, and will be … Continue reading A Half-Elf Bard for Curse of Strahd
With the advent of the DM’s Guild website, the D&D Adventurers League adventures (once known as D&D Expeditions adventures) have become available to everyone to play. It’s worth writing a word or two about what they are and how they can be used. Each adventure is a complete adventure typically lasting 2 or 4 hours (a few are 1 hour or 8 hours in length), … Continue reading About the D&D Adventurers League adventures
Just a note to all that I’ve revised an earlier post on the options available to you after you finish playing the D&D Starter Set, including more details on Out of the Abyss and adding the DMs Guild and Curse of Strahd to the article. Find it here: What to play after the D&D Starter Set Continue reading What to play after the D&D Starter Set (redux)
The newest season of D&D is upon us! Curse of Strahd, the first 5E adventure set in the land of Ravenloft, a dark gothic horror setting, will be released in select game stores on March 4th and more widely on March 15th. Many stores around the world will be running the Launch Event Death House, an introduction to the full adventure, which provides an adventure … Continue reading Entering the Death House
One of the tasks many of us have to consider over the next couple of months is how we’ll run D&D Adventurers League games. There are more options than before: they can be run at home, online, in store, at conventions, or anywhere you can run a D&D game! In this article, I’m going to discuss how I’m planning to handle it at my store. … Continue reading Planning for the next season of the D&D Adventurers League
The second section of the Tomb of Diderius has the problem most small lairs have: what happens when the party kills most of the monsters and then retreat? Are they followed by the Yuan-Ti seeking revenge? Do the Yuan-Ti just kill Varram and flee? Having monsters act intelligently when a party of adventurers makes return visits to their lair is one of the major challenges … Continue reading The Rise of Tiamat: Dealing with the Yuan-Ti
I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons for a very long time. Not for as long as some out there, but for most of my life. I’m not entirely sure which year I began, it’s been so long. It’s somewhere in the range of 1982 to 1984, however. Which means I’ve been playing for over 32 years now – three-quarters of my life! And there’s still … Continue reading Old School, New School: Thoughts on Adjusting D&D
The release of the Forgotten Realms Campaign Set in 1987 marked a significant point in how wilderness maps were handled at TSR. Instead of providing a map overlaid with hexes, as had been the case in the World of Greyhawk sets, the poster maps of the new boxed sets were unadorned with any such marks. Instead, they just showed the land of the Realms. Included … Continue reading Entering the Wilderness: Going Gridless
The track of Varram, the white wyrmspeaker, takes the characters into the Serpent Hills. The Rise of Tiamat basically glosses over a lot of what can be found in this area – the random encounter table has a few entries for ruins or relatively minor encounters. Once upon a time, TSR released a product that gave a large number of encounter tables for the Serpent … Continue reading The Rise of Tiamat revisited: The Tomb of Diderius
