Dungeons & Dragons, 3rd Edition was a major change to how Dungeons & Dragons worked. Over the years, AD&D 2E had become a sprawling beast that had a lot of very good ideas, but no unifying mechanics. Every supplement presented new ways of doing things and the resulting system had turned into rather a mess. So, 3E (which dropped the “Advanced”, though being the direct … Continue reading Hit Points Through the Editions, part 3
The Raven is the twelfth part of Misty Fortunes and Absent Hearts, the fourth season of the D&D Adventurers League adventures. By this stage in the campaign, we’re getting towards the end. The Big Bad is getting ready to implement her plan, and the adventurers need all the help they can get, because – at this stage – they don’t know where she is! The … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: The Raven
TSR released the D&D game supplement AC2: Combat Shield and Mini-adventure in 1984. It contains a DM screen for the D&D Basic and Expert games, and a short, one-session adventure by David Cook for character levels 4-7. I do not own a printed copy of this adventure; I was only able to read the adventure after it was released on the DMs Guild website. In … Continue reading Basic D&D Adventure Review: The Treasure of the Hideous One
My main love is Dungeons & Dragons. It’s the game I return to again and again. However, I also play a lot of board games. Some of them are a tiny bit like D&D. Descent: Journeys in the Dark is one of those. Descent suffers from being a game in a similar space to D&D: It requires a referee (Overlord) and players. The good thing … Continue reading Board Game Report: Descent – Road to Legend
Reign of Ruin is an adventure for levels 7-8 characters by Richard Moore published by Jon Brazer Enterprises, who have done a lot of work releasing supplements for the Pathfinder system and are also now releasing 5E adventures. Reign of Ruin is a 46-page PDF and describes an adventure where the players must stop a black dragon from establishing her rulership over the land. It … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Reign of Ruin
The best thing about Those That Came Before, the second part of the Rot from Within trilogy by Alan Patrick, is the copious advice he gives on how to run it and, even better, his notes on the philosophy behind the adventure. This is an adventure for high-level characters. It contains scaling notes for Tier 3 and Tier 4 play. At those levels, designing combats … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Those That Came Before
Xanathar’s Lost Notes to Everything Else is a release from the DM Guild’s Adepts that contains a wealth of additional options for your D&D campaign. In a previous post, I had a quick look at the new class options. It’s very hard to evaluate class options without testing them in play, but my initial impressions were mixed. As with the Wizards official release, Xanathar’s Guide … Continue reading Xanathar’s Lost Notes to Everything Else – A look at the Dungeon Master Options
One of the more fascinating mechanics of the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons is the concentration mechanic. For those not familiar with the mechanic, it creates a limitation on how many spell effects can be used at once. Each caster may only concentrate on one spell with a duration of concentration; thus, there is no way that a caster could maintain both a fly … Continue reading When Concentration Fails
When we left our brave adventurers, they were in the middle of the Valley of Dread and needed to make their way to Port Nyanzaru, many hundreds of miles to the north. Welcome to the part of Tomb of Annihilation that I like the least, and had hoped to avoid completely by running Return of the Lizard King. Guess not, huh? For those unaware of … Continue reading Running Tomb of Annihilation, Part 5: Hexcrawling
I’ve now been running D&D Adventurers League games at my local store for a little over three years, since the release of 5E – which is how long the program been in existence. We run two nights a week, and have two separate types of play: Campaign games, where the same group of players play through one of the Hardcover Adventures released by Wizards of … Continue reading D&D Adventurers League: Challenges when Scheduling for New Players
