D&D, D&D 5E, D&D Adventurers League

Thoughts on Dungeons & Dragons Adventurers League at PAX Australia 2017

The last few days I’ve been organizing and running Dungeons & Dragons games at PAX Australia. We were running eight tables at the same time of D&D throughout the 30 hours of the convention, a commitment that required 23 Dungeon Masters and support staff, and allowed us to run 125 individual tables of players – or somewhere around 720 players. The actual figure will be … Continue reading Thoughts on Dungeons & Dragons Adventurers League at PAX Australia 2017

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D&D, D&D 5E, Review

5E Accessory Review: D&D Adventure Grid

One of the more popular RPG accessory over the past few years has been the Flip-Mat, a double-sided thin cardboard mat that is pre-printed with a one-inch grid and an aesthetically pleasing (with luck!) background. They are designed so that you can use dry or wet erase markers on them, which then can be erased. With the rise in prominence of miniatures play since the … Continue reading 5E Accessory Review: D&D Adventure Grid

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D&D, D&D 5E, Review

5E Adventure Review: The Carver’s Cave

The Carver’s Cave is a short adventure by R.M. Jansen-Parkes for characters of levels 3 or 4, although it provides notes to scale it to second or even third tier parties (levels 11-16). The adventure takes a simple, unsettling concept and explores it well. It’d also really like an obliging party of characters who could get captured when you wanted them to, but the adventure … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: The Carver’s Cave

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D&D 5E, Review

5E Supplement Review: Jungle Goodies – The Treasures of Chult

Jungle Goodies is a collection of descriptions of the odd, the bizarre and the wonderful items, characters and locations you might find in Chult. Designed by Chris Bissette and Matt Sanders, it provides the harried Dungeon Master with a selection of material to help inspire games set in the jungle land. This is not a collection of magic items, despite the name. Instead, it just … Continue reading 5E Supplement Review: Jungle Goodies – The Treasures of Chult

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D&D, Design, Play Advice

Decisions and Consequences

Why do you put a puzzle in a game of Dungeons & Dragons? The answer: To challenge the players. I feel it is a great mistake to believe that it’s there to challenge the characters. They’re imaginary. They’re not playing the game. It’s the players sitting around the table with you who the puzzle is for. And, if your players don’t like puzzles, it’ll be … Continue reading Decisions and Consequences

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D&D 5E, D&D Adventurers League, Review

5E Adventure Review: Murder at the Stop

The Stop is a small town on the Trade Way as it nears Hillsfar. Life has been tough for the people of the Stop after the overthrow of the previous ruler of Hillsfar, and they haven’t been helped by the hold the Hillsfar Merchant Guild holds over their town. What happens when the representative of the Guild gets murdered? That’s the focus of Murder at … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Murder at the Stop

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D&D, D&D 5E, D&D Adventurers League, Session Report, Tomb of Annihilation

Running Tomb of Annihilation – Session 1

The memory cheats. It had been a week since our Session 0 where we created the characters for this session, and I’d ended the creation session with the description of the characters arriving in Chult. Except, now they weren’t. I described a new teleportation ritual started by their patron, and it went wrong, not sending them to Chult! Did anyone notice? No, not really. Instead, … Continue reading Running Tomb of Annihilation – Session 1

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D&D 5E, D&D Adventurers League, Review

5E Adventure Review – Bleeding Gate: Amalgamation

In the Forgotten Realms, there exists a secret society known as the Peacesmiths, with 47,417 members scattered over Faerun, which is run out of a small underground settlement no-one has heard of called Emudomier. What do they do? I don’t know. They’re apparently Emudomier’s champions and master negotiators, and they’re going missing. The characters are hired to investigate. Or rather, they’re hired to visit Raan, … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review – Bleeding Gate: Amalgamation

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D&D, D&D 5E, D&D Adventurers League, Session Report, Tomb of Annihilation

Running Tomb of Annihilation – Session 0

We’ve started running Tomb of Annihilation! Well, sort of! The first session of the campaign was what is occasionally referred to as a “Session 0”. It’s a session where the players create their characters, and everyone works out how they know each other, why they’re on the adventure, and the DM gets to discover what plot hooks will work best with the party. With Tomb … Continue reading Running Tomb of Annihilation – Session 0

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