In the late 1970s, Lawrence Schick took the best bits of the dungeons he’d designed, stuck them all together, and gave the result to TSR as a sample document hoping to persuade them to hire him. It worked. His sample document was published as S2: White Plume Mountain without changing a word, much to his surprise. It’s also one of my favourite adventures of the … Continue reading AD&D Adventure Review: White Plume Mountain
Last night, I ran Giant Diplomacy for my D&D Adventurers League table at my local gaming store. Around me, three other DMs were doing the same, attended by 23 players. Most of those players have been with us in the four preceding weeks as we’ve run the other adventures in this series. Together, we’ve all shared the experience of playing these adventures. Afterwards, we typically … Continue reading The Shared Experience in Dungeons & Dragons
Chult. Land of Dinosaurs. Far to the south of the Daleland and Waterdeep. With that, you have seen most of my knowledge of the land. Look, I’ve got the Jungles of Chult supplement/adventure, but I’ve never had an occasion to properly delve into it. Tomb of Horrors, though… yes. I’ve played that. I’ve run it, and I’ve run adventures inspired by it, including the not-confusingly-titled-at-all … Continue reading On the Tomb of Annihilation
White Plume Mountain, which has been reprinted as part of Tales from the Yawning Portal, is one of my all-time favourite Dungeons & Dragons adventures. It’s not an adventure you can take too seriously. It’s got stuff in it like a turnstile, a magic ring that talks to people and tries to convince them it’s the best thing ever (and should be fought over), and … Continue reading Running White Plume Mountain
Flames of Kythorn is one of the Elemental Evil series of D&D Adventurers League adventures. An adventure for 3-7 characters of levels 1-4, it presents the players with a fascinating situation, and then just can’t handle the landing. The basic concept behind the adventure is that a cultist of Elemental Fire has tricked an artist into painting magical pictures that cause those who view them … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Flames of Kythorn
One of the earliest adventures I owned was The Isle of Dread, a Lost World adventure where the adventurers got to explore an island inhabited by dinosaurs. Phil Beckwith’s Struggle in Three Horn Valley is also set on an island inhabited by dinosaurs, but it takes a different approach, much to my relief: Struggle in Three Horn Valley has a story. The characters begin the … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Struggle in Three Horn Valley
How do you design a maze in Dungeons & Dragons? The traditional way is to draw the map of the entire maze, and have the players explore it. Unfortunately, this tends to lead to your players getting more and more frustrated as they randomly turn left or right, hoping to get to an interesting encounter. Or they could try to map, which then significantly slows … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Halaster’s Maze of Madness
Last Friday, the participants of my D&D 5E Greyhawk game tried using a version of the variant D&D Initiative system that Mike Mearls described in a few short tweets. We ran into problems. But it was fascinating to see them in action. The system, as I understood it, required the group to declare actions at the start of each round. Depending on those actions, they’d … Continue reading Problems with a New Initiative System
As a player in a game of Dungeons & Dragons, one thing you should do at the beginning of every session is to work out what your goals are for the session. Yes, those things. What you want to accomplish. Your goals can be as simple as “kill every monster you meet and take its treasure”. (That was often my goal as a teenaged player … Continue reading Better Play of Dungeons & Dragons: Know Your Goals
As I’ve mentioned before, D&D combat is not really the most realistic of systems. This doesn’t matter much, because it’s fun! However, with Mike Mearls talking about providing an alternative initiative system, it’s revived my interest in the various initiative systems D&D has used over the years – an abiding interest of mine. Mike’s system, for those who haven’t seen it, requires all combatants to … Continue reading More on D&D Initiative: Weapon Speeds, Teamwork and Ranged Combat
