I recently finished running my players through some of Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, which I had used as part of our campaign quest to find the Rod of Seven Parts. In the early days of Dungeons & Dragons, the designers expected the players to create a map of their explorations. (The DM could gain much humour by comparing the player map to their own). … Continue reading Empty Rooms, Mapping, and Pacing
My Greyhawk campaign continues in its fortnightly fashion, and the highest-level character in it at present is 15th level. By many players’ standards, that is a level higher than they are prepared to play. There are lots of reasons why campaigns never get so high. The group can fall apart. The campaign can finish telling its story. (If you liberate the peninsula at level 10, … Continue reading Running High-Level Home Campaigns
Adventurers in Dungeons & Dragons come in all shapes and sizes and can have any number of backgrounds. However, for the purposes of many published adventures, designers tend to assume a certain type of adventurer. That type is the mercenary adventurer. That is, an individual who makes their living by selling their services. And their services are their strong sword arm or their ability with … Continue reading Who is the Standard Dungeons & Dragons Adventurer?
I love published adventures. Investigating them has proved some of the most rewarding times I have spent with Dungeons & Dragons. However, I recognised that running published D&D adventures is not to everyone’s taste, or possibly even ability. There are distinct differences between running an adventure written by someone else and one you design, and you should choose the path you enjoy more! However, even … Continue reading On Running Published Adventures
Monsters do not need innovative mechanics to be interesting. The difference in the statistics between kobolds, goblins, orcs, hobgoblins, gnolls, bugbears and ogres in original D&D (and AD&D) is minimal. What makes them different? Culture, organisation, and story. This isn’t to say that monsters shouldn’t have interesting mechanics, but they’re not the only consideration. With any monster, when I am designing a scenario, I would like … Continue reading Monsters and World-Building
If you have an ability in a game that has a chance of eliminating you from the game if you use it, what does that then do to the game? What does it do to the enjoyment of the other participants? Older board games were very fond of player elimination – where you could stop playing the game when your position was overrun. And these … Continue reading Player Elimination in Board Games and TTRPGs
Moonshae Treasure Hunt is the first of the Moonshae adventures written for D&D Adventures League play under the aegis of Baldman Games. It is intended to introduce the setting’s themes and presents four 90-minute scenarios written by different authors for beginning characters; preferably level 1 or 2. As you might expect, such short adventures give each designer limited opportunities to introduce characters and themes. All … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Moonshae Treasure Hunt
I recently ran M.T. Black’s Call of Cthulhu adventure, “The Room with No Doors”. We had fun. I see this as a single-session adventure. The text says it runs in 3-6 hours, but we ran it in about three, perhaps a little under. At its heart, it is a ghost story. The characters need to investigate a haunted house and stop the haunting there. However, … Continue reading The Room with No Doors review
In general, the most disruptive event you could have in a Dungeons & Dragons game is the Total Party Kill (TPK). That event where every member of the party dies. One player character dying is a tragedy, but the campaign continues. However, if everyone dies, then it stops all the ongoing stories of the characters and could derail the campaign completely. The possibility of a … Continue reading On Total Party Kills
I am extremely bad at this. In the beginning, Dungeons & Dragons had a definite structure for how you handled dungeon exploration. It went something like this: Exploration is broken into ten-minute turns On the party’s turn, they can perform one of these activities: Move up to their speed – assumed to be slowly and while mapping, so 120 feet per 10 minutes was fast! … Continue reading Structured Dungeoneering
