One of the flaws I have seen in Organised Play adventures (such as the D&D Adventurers League) is this: Starting the scenario with a wide-open question and no set goal. For instance, you start in a town’s marketplace. Or a tavern. And the next question is “what do you do?” What is missing here? An immediate goal for the characters! Why are they in the … Continue reading On Opening Scenes of Organised Play Adventures
In 1984, TSR published the second of the Conan adventures, Against Darkness, by Ken Rolston. Oddly, it also proclaims on its title page that Anne C. Gray developed it; I can only imagine that Anne contributed significantly to the adventure. Such a significant credit line is rare in the products of the TSR era! As with the first adventure, Conan Unchained, this is a very … Continue reading AD&D Adventure Review – Conan: Against Darkness!
In Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus, the characters are looking for the Sword of Zariel. They learned in Chapter 2 that their holyphant companion, Lulu, abandoned the sword in an alabaster castle surrounded by a red scab. In the early stages of Chapter 3, the amnesiac Lulu remembers where it is. She is wrong. After that, she has divine inspiration and points the characters to … Continue reading Running Descent into Avernus part 11: Starting the Path of Devils
The skill system in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons says only a little about what each skill can do, certainly when compared to previous editions. 3.5E, for instance, was very detailed about what skills covered. However, with that lack of definition comes freedom – and confusion. Especially when one player moves to a different group and discovers that the skill does not do what they … Continue reading Thoughts about Skills in Dungeons & Dragons
I have recently been contemplating the Runequest game, which I find fascinating and challenging to approach at the same time. One of the reasons I find it so difficult is that the stat blocks in the game are long. And there are a lot of them. One of the introductory adventures features the characters defending a town against raiders. And every single raider has their … Continue reading On the Complexity and Length of Stat Blocks
In the early days of Dungeons & Dragons, the rulebooks gave various methods of determining what monster was randomly encountered. The earliest tables used a flat roll – roll a d6. On a 1 it is an orc. On a 2 it is a goblin. And so on and so forth. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons gave a more nuanced approach: Percentile tables, with different probabilities … Continue reading Random Encounters: 1d8 + 1d12
As I continue to examine the older documents of my Dungeons & Dragons campaigns set in the World of Greyhawk, I discovered this oddity – a list of rumours assembled after the fact to describe what happened for several years of the campaign. It is a long document, so here I present only the events described for 581 CY. This is in the period leading … Continue reading Rumours from the World of Greyhawk – 581 CY
Examining my old archives, I found the following entries relating to campaigns played 20 years ago or more… We played the events in 578 CY in 1997-8, if I recall correctly, using the AD&D 2nd Edition rules (using the Player Options books). The later events came from a campaign begun in 2000, in the weeks leading up to the release of D&D 3E and beyond! … Continue reading Memories of Greyhawk
Due to a lack of power in the winter – using primarily solar power has its drawbacks – I have not been able to play board games with friends as often as I would like. In better days, this would not have been a problem, but we are in lockdown, as we have been for six long months, and I cannot see my friends except … Continue reading First Impressions of Marco Polo II: In the Service of the Khan
Bigby’s Handbook of Creative Spell Use is a 76-page supplement that describes techniques of using and combining spells to get more out of them than might initially be apparent. The supplement uses the landscape format, to the joy of some of my friends, and presents 50 spell-casting combinations. They range from gloriously off-the-wall and brilliant, to mundane and obvious, and there are a few hopelessly … Continue reading 5E Supplement Review: Bigby’s Handbook of Creative Spell Use
