Doorway to Darkness, an adventure for four 2nd-level characters by James Desborough and M.T. Black, takes a solid idea – a mine being overrun by zombies – and adds enough unusual features to it to provide interest and entertainment. It’s very easy to just have a parade of combat encounters. Having features to mix them up, to engage the players and tell a story, is … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Doorway to Darkness
Tony Petrecca’s Killer Kobolds is an adventure for 8th-12th level characters. Yes, you read that right: A high-level adventure featuring kobolds. It’s also a beautifully-constructed adventure. Deriving from events in Tony’s home game, we get to see what Defence in Depth means when applied to kobolds. I’d stay well clear of this one if you’ve got a group of players who prefer to negotiate: it’s a … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Killer Kobolds
Playing Dungeons & Dragons well requires several skills. You don’t need to be great in all of them, but it helps to have some familiarity with all of them. For parts of the game like role-playing and exploration, you get better at them with practice. This is especially true of role-playing. The more you speak to DM-controlled characters, the better you get at it. I’m … Continue reading Dungeons & Dragons Tips: Know Your Character’s Abilities
You will occasionally see people like me banging on about all the miniatures we have and how they really, really enhance our Dungeons & Dragons experiences. Then you look at your own collection of three miniatures and a bunch of chess pieces and wonder how other people ever got their miniature collections. Here’s the truth: Miniature collecting is expensive. Most likely financially – most miniatures … Continue reading On Collecting Miniatures
Just a note that I’ve updated my checklist of D&D Adventurers League adventures to include new Author-Only adventures and Con-Created Content. It’s available on the DMs Guild. It lists each of the D&D adventures that can be played in the League, breaking them down into season and tier. Continue reading D&D Adventurers League checklist update
My friend Teos Abadia recently made fun of me for not opening a bunch of D&D Miniatures boxes that have been sitting on my shelf for the past six months or so. They’re still not open, and I’ve just put more boxes of the latest miniature release on top of them… likewise unopened. The idea was that I’d open them and review them, but life … Continue reading To Miniature, or not To Miniature
Every so often, a rather unusual product enters my review pile. This is the case with The Undertaker, a character background designed by Jerry LeNeave, known better to me as DreadGazeebo on Twitter. The product is just a solitary page, which describes the background. It’s also an object lesson on how to design personality traits for a background. I read them, and I’m inspired by … Continue reading 5E Supplement Review: The Undertaker
Screams at Sunset is an adventure for levels 2-4 by Jeff C. Stevens. It is also an adventure for levels 4-6, if you use the alternative version with monsters from Volo’s Guide to Monsters. The adventure begins with the characters coming to the aid of a farmstead that is being attacked by goblinoids – goblins, hobgoblins and bugbears – and allows the characters to investigate … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Screams at Sunset
It has not escaped my attention that not everyone is as fast as arithmetic as I am. Adding two numbers together can take time. The play of the current edition of Dungeons & Dragons isn’t as bad for this as 3E (where adding 17 and 24 together wasn’t that unusual at the higher levels). Combat in D&D often plays like this: “I attack and roll … Continue reading A Tip for Quicker Play of Dungeons & Dragons Combat
For the first time in a little while, I started a new Dungeons & Dragons campaign on Friday. As with most of my home campaigns (as opposed to the store-based play where I run the published adventures in the Forgotten Realms), this campaign is set in the venerable World of Greyhawk setting. I’ve been running campaigns in that world since 1998, and I was playing … Continue reading A New Dungeons & Dragons Campaign
