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An outlet for our unhealthy obsessions with Tabletop Role Playing.

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Showing posts from 2020

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The Defiance of Urukkesh, part 1

Posted by Lazzamore March 12, 2020

D&D Fiction Kobold Press Midgard

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Southlands Adventure Path: Introducing Marcus Raventree, Human Bard

Posted by Clayton Thomson March 02, 2020

D&D D&D 5E Kobold Press Midgard Southlands Adventure Path

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Eberron through the Lens of its Novels

Posted by atanamar February 19, 2020

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Confessions of Game Master: I Didn’t Like our World, So I Created My Own

Posted by DeeKay February 18, 2020

D&D Elfquest Rifts World Building

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Southlands Adventure Path: Introducing Nidalee the Brave, female Nkosi Ranger

Posted by Clayton Thomson February 17, 2020

D&D D&D 5E Kobold Press Midgard Southlands Adventure Path

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Why I don’t do dungeon delves, or the glory of The Numenera Ruin Mapping Engine

Posted by atanamar February 15, 2020

D&D 5E Frog God Games Monte Cook Games Numenera Rappan Athuk

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Underchurch: a D&D story

Posted by Lazzamore February 14, 2020

D&D D&D 5E Fiction Midgard Planescape World Building

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“Whispers in the Dark” brings fantastic mechanics to run your own modern-day thriller RPG in 5e

Posted by Clayton Thomson January 12, 2020

D&D 5E Game Mastering horror M.T. Black Matt Corely Player Options thrillers World Building

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Who are you people?

(pronounced: kay-Oh-si-tekts) Things like order and patterns are just flukes in an ever-changing and fundamentally unpredictable multiverse.

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Using D&D 5E Downtime Rules to Add Verisimilitude

Tell me if this seems familiar. A party of low level adventures embark on an epic quest. They are young but plucky and decide to take on the world. Eventually, they become pinnacles of their respective classes, with the power to reshape the futures of kingdoms! But there is something odd about them. It has only been 3-4 years of “in-game” time and they have spent all of that time adventuring. Despite their vast power to affect the world they are not really tied to the world. They have no homes and no real goals in life other than seeing how much a random wizard in a bar is willing to offer them explore the next dungeon or slay the next dragon.

This is because most D&D games move from adventure to adventure at a breakneck pace. In many ways this makes sense. After all, the adventure is the exciting part and the players have limited time. Nobody wants to spend a whole game session where fighter is running that bar he always wanted to own, the wizard is researching a new s…

Why I don’t do dungeon delves, or the glory of The Numenera Ruin Mapping Engine

I’ve never seen the allure of dungeon delves. Apart from the fellowship’s brief and epic romp through Moria, crawling through dungeons wasn’t a thing in the sword & sorcery of my youth. By the time role playing entered into my young consciousness, its concept was informed by the Dragonlance novels, the swashbuckling absurdity of Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, and the morose transdimensional wanderings of Elric of Melniboné.

I never bothered with dungeons, in the Gygaxian sense, in my formative role playing days. Of course, my early roleplaying days were bereft of Dungeons & Dragons itself thanks to the satanic panic. Middle Earth Role Playing and Rolemaster were, to my mind, tools to explore ancient, abandoned kingdoms and the tractless, monster infested, and unpopulated lands in between. No one in those worlds built massive, deadly puzzle dungeons for characters to explore because, well, that’s far fetched even for fantasy.

Why is this on my mind? At this very moment I’m …

Using Rolemaster Critical Tables to Describe Weapon & Spell Damage

I started playing tabletop games with Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP), and then Rolemaster in times of yore. Both systems use d100 tables to describe the results of critical hits. When I picked back up the dungeon mastering mantle with D&D 5E, where damage is meted out in mere hit points, I cracked open that Rolemaster red box and pulled out the goods.

Those crit tables are always on my mind when I run games. It's probably unhealthy. The tables are full of colorful, brutal, realistic, and hilarious descriptions of weapon attacks, divided up by damage type (in Arms Law). There are incredible descriptions of spell crits for various damage types (heat, electricity, cold) in Spell Law. Those are especially useful for when "Foe freezes solid and then shatters into thousands of pieces after falling down 20 feet behind impact point."

As my players will attest, I try to describe the realistic impact of each weapon and spell attack. It helps to keep folks engaged (IRL) in …

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