Dungeons & Dragons has some of the weirdest, most inconsistent approaches to how it defines its new editions. There are very few games that have changed that much over the years, but the number of changes aren’t quite reflected in the edition numbering. It doesn’t help that there were two different strands of D&D for a decade. Changes in the game have been big and … Continue reading What makes a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons?
I ran my second session of Pathfinder’s The Abomination Vaults the other night. It went well, as these things go. Not brilliantly, but we finished exploring the first level of the dungeon. I’d reviewed the rules around combat before the session, and was pleased to see that I still remembered most of them. The main things I had to remember this time were the rules … Continue reading More Grumpy Pathfinder
I feel I’m becoming a grumpy, middle-aged man. “Becoming?” someone mutters in a corner. “You’ve been that for a while now.” There are a lot of games I bounce off rather hard, but there are some that I think I should like a lot more than I do. And so, I keep trying to play them, even though it might not be the best idea. … Continue reading A Grumpy GM and a Giant Scorpion
Over the many years I’ve played role-playing games, there are a few games that I have never really had the chance to sit down and play. Runequest, in the form of its 2nd edition (1979) was a game I played a couple of games of at school, and I have run a couple of sessions of it later in my life, but never to a … Continue reading Exploring the RuneQuest RPG
Wizards of the Coast have put out several big campaign adventures for D&D. And many of them left some DMs wondering “How the eff do I run that?” It’s important to note that this feeling is not confined to their products. It’s true of every adventure publisher, but people are most likely to have seen those big campaign adventures for D&D. I believe that some … Continue reading Adventures, Designer Assumptions, and GM Capabilities
In the forty-odd years, I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons, most of the magic items I give out come from the core rulebooks. There are several reasons for this, mainly because I often use random magic item tables rather than selecting items to match the characters. The random tables typically only exist in the core book. And it becomes very hard when the magic items are … Continue reading Supplement Review: Vault of Magic
I dread hearing as a DM that one of the players is going to go off on their own and try something. This isn’t because it’s hard to run their actions – this will rarely be the case. But it’s because it suddenly turns the game from a group endeavour into something where we’ve got players waiting around for others to finish what they’re doing. … Continue reading Going it alone
Area 1. Entrance Chamber (30 ft. square) Stone steps lead down from the ruins above to this chamber. An iron door, scratched and dented, stands in the middle of the opposite wall. The floor is likewise scratched and scored, and dried blood covers a lot of it. In the corners of the room, broken crossbow bolts and bits of metal rust away. The gnomes and … Continue reading Dungeon 23: Area 1 – Entrance Chamber
The Queen of Spades is a Dungeons & Dragons adventure for level 7 characters that should last from eight to sixteen hours. At its heart, it is an investigative adventure set in the Forgotten Realms, where the heroes must face a force of chaos and – especially – bad luck. The adventure does a lot of things very right. I am particularly impressed by how … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: The Queen of Spades
Warriors of Krynn is not the game I was expecting. When I heard that the new Dragonlance adventure, Shadow of the Dragon Queen, was getting a supplementary board game for resolving the clashes between armies, I though that it would be about, you know, battles between armies. It isn’t. Well, it is, but that’s in the background. Instead, it’s about the actions of the heroes … Continue reading Warriors of Krynn – First Impressions
