One of the odder products I’ve seen recently is this free adventure from Wizards of the Coast, Giants of the Star Forge. A companion adventure to Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants, this adventure is for level 16 characters and should take a single 3-or-4-hour session to play. Or possibly longer. I’ve seen how some groups take a long time to resolve combat. I say … Continue reading Adventure Review – Giants of the Star Forge
One of the weirder situations in my gaming career occurred yesterday. For the last several months, we’ve been playing Adventures in Middle Earth, a 5E-based RPG in the Lord of the Rings setting. In the previous session, we killed a dragon, which – as you might imagine – was a pretty big deal. Yesterday, we were in a tavern, investigating a missing metalworker. This was … Continue reading Of Dragons and Consequences
In the early days of Dungeons & Dragons, you gained XP for treasure acquired. Typically, this made up 80% of your total XP, the rest came from slaying monsters. One of the fun things is that not everyone liked giving XP for treasure, so there were various attempts to change this. One of the factions (no XP for treasure) managed to make that the base … Continue reading Wandering Monsters and Experience
I finished my first play through of Final Fantasy XVI on the weekend. 65 hours, or thereabouts, it took me. I did most of the side quests, and all the main story. I had an absolute blast. The next day, The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg arrived. This was the product of a Kickstarter I was quite looking forward to – a reproduction of Greg Svenson’s … Continue reading Final Fantasy and The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg
I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XVI recently. If you’re wondering, I’m really enjoying it. I’m also over 40 hours in, and wonder how people with normal lives will take to play it. I’ve been on holiday this week, which has allowed me more time than normal. One of the features of the game is that it has really cinematic boss encounters. The … Continue reading Boss Encounters
I have a sneaking suspicion that telling players how many encounters there will be in a session may end up with an improved Dungeons & Dragons experience. D&D began with explorations into a dungeon, where the players went for long as they felt able, then returned home. As this continued, players developed the concept of using all expendable powers and spells in the first encounters … Continue reading Another way to manage player resources
You might say you want to start a session at 7 pm, but what’s likely to happen is a lot of catching up first. Or waiting for Roll20 to load its images. (My internet connection is not the best). So, starting the session at about 7:20 pm was pretty good going! We began the second session of Shadow of the Dragon Queen with the players … Continue reading Shadow of the Dragon Queen, Session 2
The latest session of my 5E Greyhawk campaign saw the players investigating a pocket of the Demiplane of Shadow that was accessible beneath their hometown. In our previous campaign, the town of Brusington was endangered by Shadow Fey, before the heroes of that game managed to negotiate a treaty with them. This time around, the Shadow Fey had requested a favour of the townsfolk: that … Continue reading Greyhawk: Into the Demiplane of Shadow
I have recently seen some discussion about the confused messaging Wizards of the Coast is giving about its One D&D project. You know, the new core rulebooks it is releasing in 2024, marking the 50th anniversary of the game. The rules we are currently playtesting? (Or avoiding playtesting). And it occurred to me that the compatibility between editions of the game is not entirely dissimilar … Continue reading Why is Dungeons & Dragons like a PlayStation?
I recently saw a commentator on 5E be very disappointed at the character options in Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants. And it made me think: What do you release when an edition is ending and the new one is soon releasing? Funnily enough, it’s not something that has come up that many times in the history of Dungeons & Dragons. When OD&D transitioned into … Continue reading What do you Release at the End of an Edition?
