Adventures I don’t design for publication? They don’t need so much text! The premise? Goblins are raiding from an old keep (the upper floor is destroyed). However, the goblins are plagued by an old summoning circle in the basement, which keeps letting loose Abyssal Maws! They’ve got a deal with some ogres to keep the maws in, but they’d prefer to get rid of them … Continue reading A Home Adventure
Some things you learn through experience. When I first played Dungeons & Dragons, while AD&D 1st Edition was the main edition, I got very frustrated by the magic item creation rules. Too vague! The DM had to do too much work! Where do you get those ingredients anyway? I understood that crafting magic items was an important part of the magic-user’s abilities – the book … Continue reading Crafting Magic Items – and the Effect on the Campaign
I recently played the first of the Star Trek Adventures organised play adventures, Decision Point. It was my first experience with the system, which meant we ignored a lot of the mechanics and concentrated on the story. The story revolved around an ethical dilemma: Do we break the Prime Directive of Starfleet (non-interference) and save some of the population of a doomed planet? Or do … Continue reading Troubles with Ethical Dilemmas
Shawn Merwin and Chris Sniezak recently touched on the phenomenon of most groups always turning left when they came to an intersection in a dungeon, as part of their Down with D&D podcast. The decision to “turn left first” is one I’ve observed at many tables over the last couple of decades. My feeling is that it comes partly from the decision to take the … Continue reading In the Dungeon: Left or Right?
Keep things short. Don’t overexplain. That background you wrote? It should be shorter. That NPC personality? Do you need that much detail? Try dot points. If you take over a page for an encounter, it’s too long. If it’s over a column, can you shorten it? Adventures are read twice, if you’re lucky. Once to prepare, and once during the running. When a DM runs … Continue reading On Brevity, Clarity and Adventure Writing
Imagine a game of Dungeons & Dragons where everyone was a fighter, there were no short or long rests, and the only way you could regain hit points was by returning home and resting for a week or more. In many ways, that’s how the original game was. Clerics didn’t get healing magic until second level, and then it could only restore 1d6 hit points … Continue reading Healing, Spells and Resources: The Pacing of Dungeons & Dragons
There are times in your life when you want to use a monster one of your friends has written. Well, perhaps it’s never happened to you, but it’s happened to me. So, here’s the result: Buried Temple of the Death God. Which demonstrates that I wanted to use as clichéd a title for the adventure as possible. As the monster was released as OGL (that … Continue reading Buried Temple of the Death God – Fight or Flight?
In my last post, I described the initial concept of an adventure. The next stage of this adventure is to get into a little more detail as to what the PCs will face. Let’s start with the tomb encounter. This is where the players meet the “recovery specialists” who are trying to loot the tomb before the PCs. I’m building this encounter for 5 PCs … Continue reading Designing an Adventure: Choosing the Monsters
I’ve decided I need to design a new adventure. The “announcement” that the next adventure season of D&D will be in Undermountain has fired my imagination. I’d very much like to design a series of short dungeon adventures detailing undiscovered corners of the megadungeon. So, why not? Okay, the “announcement” didn’t actually say “it’s Undermountain”. It just hinted, very heavily, that Undermountain is next. It’s … Continue reading Designing an Adventure: First Steps
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
