Cut to the Chase Games ran a successful Kickstarter to bring the Wrath of the Kobolds trilogy of adventure modules to us. The first two adventures: Caves of the Kobold Queen and Curse of the Kobold Eye are now available through DriveThruRPG, as is a prequel adventure, Night of the Mad Kobold, which I reviewed a few weeks ago. This is a review of WK1: … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Caves of the Kobold Queen
Although hex-based exploration was the dominant form of wilderness exploration in the early days of Dungeons & Dragons, a few adventures used a hybrid approach that drew on dungeon design. That is, they limited the ways that players could move between encounters. Occasionally they would be hard limits – the depiction of the Underdark in Descent into the Depths of the Earth was that way … Continue reading Entering the Wilderness: Tracked Exploration
Johua De Santo has written quite a few adventures by this point, and The Bards of Ur is the latest of his Patreon-supported games to see release. It’s a short adventure of 8 pages, and is apparently designed for mid-level adventurers, although I’m not quite sure what that means. Levels 5-10? Possibly. The concept behind the adventure is a good one: a group of mysterious … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: The Bards of Ur
Dungeons & Dragons play is traditionally divided into three environments: Dungeon, Urban and Wilderness. Of those three, the Dungeon is by far the easiest to prepare and run. The Wilderness, on the other hand, is something I find particularly challenging to DM. The early D&D booklets suggested using the map of Outdoor Survival (an Avalon Hill boardgame) to represent the wilderness just around the dungeon, … Continue reading Entering the Wilderness: Exploration and Castles
With the prophet of the air cult now slain, the group were able to return to the Air Temple and explore mostly unmolested. A few kenku remained in the ruined underground city, but they scattered and fled from the adventurers – the few that did not quickly learnt the error of their ways, probably from a fireball spell exploding nearby! It was certain that the … Continue reading Princes of the Apocalypse, sessions 20-21
One of the more common pieces of advice to give new Dungeon Masters (and Game Masters) these days is that they should say “Yes” to their players. This is good advice. It comes from an understanding of the creative process: that you get more interesting results when you don’t shut down the creativity of the players. At one of the sessions I ran at PAX … Continue reading DM Tips: When to Say “No”
With the recent release of the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide, the D&D Adventurers League has allowed everyone to rebuild their characters. Although this is intended primarily so you can include material from the new book, the option to rebuild is open to all players even if their rebuild doesn’t use material from the Adventurer’s Guide. Normally, you can rebuild your character any number of times … Continue reading Rebuilding your D&D Adventurers League Character
Well, it’s been a fun (and exhausting) three days. We ran a LOT of D&D at PAX Australia. Yes, only four tables, but that’s four tables by THIRTY HOURS! Two of the tables were running 1-hour games, all the better to introduce players to D&D. And we had a lot of new players. (We also had players returning to play more. And we had to … Continue reading PAX Australia 2015 thoughts
One of the stranger things missing so far from the D&D 5E releases from Wizards of the Coast is an “Open Gaming” License directly applicable to D&D 5E. There have been hints of it going back before the release of the game, but – as of this writing – no license has materialised. (I just want to make clear that it’s not really the lack of … Continue reading Thoughts on the missing Open Gaming License
I use Microsoft Word to create most of my characters. Calculations? Form-fillable sheets? Nah. Good old word-processing. I’m not really much of a stylist. Anyway, one or two people asked about the templates I used to create the pregenerated characters I’ve been posting. I don’t really have templates, but I can share with you the basic word files if you want to fiddle with them. … Continue reading Character Sheets!
