Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk is a 2023 campaign adventure published by Wizards of the Coast that takes characters from levels 1 through 12. It incorporates the excellent starter set adventure The Lost Mine of Phandelver, and then continues onwards for seven more levels of exciting adventure. Or at least, they hope you’ll find it exciting. The new material involves a plot by mind … Continue reading Review: The Shattered Obelisk
There’s recently been a bit of discussion, prompted by this video of Matt Colville, about making up a campaign based on a lot of shorter published adventures. And some people are lamenting that people won’t do it today since they don’t know that short adventures exist. Because Wizards of the Coast only publish long adventures. In fact, they do publish short adventures. Just not (for … Continue reading A campaign of short, published adventures
We played our eighteenth session of The Shattered Obelisk on Monday, February 26, 2024. Everyone was in attendance – the DM (me) and all three players. In that virtual kind of way that we have by playing on Roll20. The group is five characters, though. I run the fighter (Simeon) as an NPC, because running a champion that way is very quick. And the artificer’s … Continue reading The Shattered Obelisk, session 18
The first adventure in the Expert series had been the fairly serious Isle of Dread. The second had been more of a funhouse dungeon in Castle Amber. Expert Set Adventure Module X3, Curse of Xanathon, wandered into some seriously weird territory. It is designed for 5-8 characters of levels 5-7. Douglas Niles had begun his writing career at TSR by writing the not-for-novices novice-series adventure … Continue reading Classic D&D Review: Curse of Xanathon
What would happen if you ran a campaign in 5E where you only allowed three classes: Fighter, Cleric, or Wizard? Well, it’d probably go quite well. Those three classes cover a lot of bases. Why did I select them? They were the original classes in Dungeons & Dragons. The rogue (thief) came along later – the first supplement added both the Thief and the Paladin. … Continue reading Only Three Classes? A Greyhawk Campaign Proposal
I was having a discussion the other day with Mike Shea and a few other people on his discord about mechanics that are “All or Nothing”. Which is a really inaccurate way of saying spells like Hold Person – either it works or it fails, and you’ve given up a resource to attempt the action. “Do or Die” mechanics? “Risk it All” mechanics? I don’t … Continue reading “All or Nothing” Mechanics
Today’s the day that the second part of the Final Fantasy VII remakes comes out – this one called Rebirth. I’ve been playing through the first part (Remake), and it’s an example of how good content can be expanded, given excellent voice acting and gameplay, and become even more than the original. It’s funny to think of a game from so long ago – the … Continue reading Final Fantasy VII
We completed Chapter 6 in this session of Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk, which was run on Monday, February 19, 2023. The current characters in the campaign are: Syzoth’s player controls the rogue henchman, I control Simeon. (Simeon stays out of discussion for the most part, though I occasionally employ him to aid roleplaying between characters). When we left off our previous session, the … Continue reading The Shattered Obelisk, session 17
When Dungeons & Dragons began, large parties of characters entered the dungeons. When AD&D came along, it was basically assumed that nine people would venture into the dungeon, in a 3 by 3 square. By the rules of the time, three men could stand abreast in a 10-foot corridor. Although D&D was inspired by miniature gaming, it quickly lost the miniatures and became what we … Continue reading Trends of Lowering Character Numbers
We ran this session of The Shattered Obelisk on Monday, February 12, 2024. The party began the session at the great crossroads at the heart of Gibbet Crossing, after killing the lone alpha grick that was there. Listening carefully, they heard rustling sounds to the west. My party is very much of the mind that you shouldn’t leave monsters to creep up on them, so … Continue reading The Shattered Obelisk, session 16
