Gale Force 9 have been producing a range of accessories for D&D for a while now. Their early 5E releases weren’t always well received, but, with their two main Curse of Strahd accessories – the Tarokka deck and the Curse of Strahd DM Screen – they’ve managed to put out a couple of products I really like. The player’s side of the DM Screen features … Continue reading 5E Accessory Review: Curse of Strahd DM Screen
DDAL04-06 The Ghost is the mid-season finale of Misty Fortunes and Absent Hearts, the fourth season of D&D Adventurers League adventures. Or, at least, it could be if you squint really hard. Honestly, it’s hard to know what to make of it. Somewhere in the writing process – either in initial conception, its writing, or the editing – something went badly wrong with the story. … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: The Ghost
Aaron “Quickleaf” Infante-Levy’s adventure The Beast of Graenseskov is a grand investigative adventure set in eastern Barovia. A large wolf-like creature has begun to terrorise the lands around the Graenseskov forest, and it is the player characters who need to discover what the creature is and how to stop it. The 80-page adventure describes the inhabitants of the land, the locations, and the events that … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: The Beast of Graenseskov
The fifth adventure of the current D&D Adventurers League season is The Seer, a 2-hour adventure for 1st-4th level characters. It’s written assuming the party has five 4th-level characters, and contains the standard DDAL scaling notes. As always, DMs should treat the adventure with care and scale appropriately for their group. When writing adventures, it’s very hard to properly assess the strength of a group … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: The Seer
DDAL04-04 The Marionette continues the D&D Adventurers League storyline, “Misty Fortunes and Absent Hearts”, with an adventure that draws together storylines begun in previous adventures. It might also have just a little too much content in it; not really a problem for home games, but certainly one for convention and in-store play. It has been reported that a DM whose group has a more leisurely … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: The Marionette
Backgrounds, volume 1 is a short pdf of 10 pages that presents four new backgrounds for the D&D game: Animal Trainer, Flying Cavalry, Innkeeper and Teamster. One of the attractions of designing new backgrounds is that they’re light on rules material; they’re not as intensive to design as (say) spells or monsters. However, the focus becomes much more on your writing skills. Thankfully, the supplement … Continue reading 5E Supplement Review: Backgrounds, volume 1
B Simon Smith’s Plants and Fungi of the Realms is an unusual supplement. Over its 31 pages, it presents a very large number of plants and fungi that can be used to distinguish the vegetation of a Forgotten Realms game – or any other fantasy game – from the real world. Some of the descriptions are just that – descriptive, with a little bit of … Continue reading 5E Supplement Review: Plants and Fungi of the Realms
DDAL04-03: The Executioner is the third of the fourth season of D&D Adventurers League adventures. (The program formerly known as Expeditions). It is also, I’m sorry to say, the worst adventure of them all, by a fair margin. Quite frankly, it’s shit. It’s an adventure without a beginning, without an end, and with a weak middle. A lot of the problems come down to the … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: The Executioner
The original release of Dungeons & Dragons presented dragons at six various ages throughout their life – at Very Young, Young, Sub-Adult, Adult, Old and Very Old. At the time, six-sided dice were used for hit points. While for an ogre you’d pick up 4d6 and take the total, Dragons assumed that each dice had the same result. Thus, very young dragons had 1 hit … Continue reading 5E Supplement Review: Dragons!
The latest set of WizKids Icons of the Realms miniatures for D&D has been released: Monster Menagerie. It consists of 44 figures randomly packed in 4-miniature blind booster packs, and one “case” figure sold separately, the Treant. As this set has a couple of figures in the set I was interested in, I picked up 2 b ricks of the set (separately, so they weren’t from … Continue reading D&D Miniatures Review: Monster Menagerie
