5E Adventure Review: A Lesson in Love
In A Lesson in Love, you need to discover a missing elf for her grieving father. However, the adventure doesn’t flow smoothly… Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: A Lesson in Love
The Essential Spells for Dungeon-Delving
If you’ve ever played an old-school dungeon-delve, or a new-school death trap (see Tomb of Annihilation), you’ve likely needed a variety of spells to save you from a horrible fate. Or rather, your horrible fate would have been avoided if you’d had these spells. The current edition of D&D doesn’t require these spells to the same extent as previous editions (notably 3E), but you’re likely … Continue reading The Essential Spells for Dungeon-Delving
5E Adventure Review: Hatemaster
Hatemaster is the second adventure of the second Phlan series from Baldman Games. It can be played as a stand-alone adventure, but works best as part of that series, where you need to rescue the three candidates for the rulership of Phlan from the clutches of the Black Lord, Bane. The adventure’s main conceit is to send the adventurers back in time, where they must … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Hatemaster
Designing an Adventure: Choosing the Monsters
In my last post, I described the initial concept of an adventure. The next stage of this adventure is to get into a little more detail as to what the PCs will face. Let’s start with the tomb encounter. This is where the players meet the “recovery specialists” who are trying to loot the tomb before the PCs. I’m building this encounter for 5 PCs … Continue reading Designing an Adventure: Choosing the Monsters
Designing an Adventure: First Steps
I’ve decided I need to design a new adventure. The “announcement” that the next adventure season of D&D will be in Undermountain has fired my imagination. I’d very much like to design a series of short dungeon adventures detailing undiscovered corners of the megadungeon. So, why not? Okay, the “announcement” didn’t actually say “it’s Undermountain”. It just hinted, very heavily, that Undermountain is next. It’s … Continue reading Designing an Adventure: First Steps
D&D Adventurers League – Asia Pacific – News
I may no longer be the Regional Co-ordinator for the APAC region, but I still remain fascinated by what’s going on in the D&D Adventurers League in the Asia-Pacific. Two items caught my attention this week: Save the Children of Mulmaster Michael Balin recently organised a charity event where 165 players from eight stores in Australia played through the D&D Epic, Mulmaster Undone. Over $3,000 was … Continue reading D&D Adventurers League – Asia Pacific – News
D&D Tips: How to set the Difficulty of Skill Checks
The Dungeon Master’s Guide gives a handy table of sample DCs for skill checks. However, what they don’t tell you is the context in which they should be used. This article explores the potential skill bonuses at various levels of play and suggests DCs to use in various circumstances. First, we need to examine what bonuses the characters have. In a group of adventurers, skill … Continue reading D&D Tips: How to set the Difficulty of Skill Checks
D&D Adventurers League games in Melbourne
There’s a couple of places that have started running D&D Adventurers League games in Melbourne, Australia. This makes me very happy. Good Games Melbourne Andrew Callaghan is organising D&D Adventurers League games at Good Games Melbourne. The first session will be on Thursday, April 26th at around 6 pm. He’s looking for players and additional DMs. You can find his posts about this on Facebook … Continue reading D&D Adventurers League games in Melbourne
Boardgaming Saturday: Great Western Trail, A Feast for Odin and Through the Ages
A Magic: the Gathering pre-release event meant that we couldn’t play D&D Adventurers League games on Saturday. So, instead, I played a few board-games with one of my friends. Great Western Trail This is one of my favourite games at present. We played two games on Saturday, each lasting a little under an hour. It plays very well with two to four players. With four … Continue reading Boardgaming Saturday: Great Western Trail, A Feast for Odin and Through the Ages
Pathfinder II – Modifier Madness
One thing that greatly irritates me about Pathfinder is the plethora of conditional modifiers. There are usually very good game-world reasons for those modifiers, but the more of them there are, the harder it gets to keep track of everything. I just noticed one of them in the latest blog entry on PF2, Secrets of Alchemy. Now, thematically this is a fantastic item. It’s very … Continue reading Pathfinder II – Modifier Madness