Ross Castle—Killarney I've been running some Dungeon World games (off stream) for members of the Variant Roles community for the last month or so. It's not a "serious" campaign, for whatever value you might attach to that word. It feels more like a series of one-shots, sometimes with recurring characters. This all stems from the … Continue reading Community Dungeon World Games
NB: Stream of consciousness style. Just throwing this down someplace. "Broken Concentration" by Clint Cearley I really need to end my Wednesday game because weeknights are just too difficult. I've already cancelled my Tuesday and Thursday games, and I haven't done Monday in a long time. Already, this Wednesday and next have no game because … Continue reading Spring 2019 Campaign Musings
Originally, I wrote this post to talk about all the things I dislike about the changes to the Adventurers League rule set. Most of it comes down to treasure. Magic item counts in the previous rules had their problems, but folks could understand; now you need a cheat sheet just to understand what you get. … Continue reading Outgrowing Adventurers League
Leave No Trace - Pat Lee I recently left my last Adventurers League campaign, in which a player from my Out of the Abyss campaign is now running Waterdeep: Dragon Heist for approximately the same group. A number of reasons led to this choice, including the AL Season 8 ruleset. However, the fact that I really prefer the GM … Continue reading What other folks say about running versus playing games
I recently concluded two long-running campaigns, both of which started in late 2017. After some reflection and discussion with the players, I realized that I could extract some lessons to improve my future role-playing games. This post isn't really a review of the source material, just an overview of what I learned from running this campaign. … Continue reading Out of the Abyss campaign review
For the last several months, I have had the good fortune to play about as much D&D as I can handle. The large majority of these games have occurred under the banner of the Adventurers League on Roll20 (using Discord for voice and out-of-game text chat) and, to a lesser extent, at a local gaming … Continue reading How I recruit for online AL games
Episodic campaigns are important because people have lives. At some point, it becomes difficult to meet as regularly and consistently as we would like: jobs, kids, other responsibilities take priority. So maybe we need to go back to the way we used to play when we were younger, in sort of an episodic fashion. By … Continue reading Episodic Campaigns
I recently started running the Tomb of Annihilation adventure with a group of players from my summer Rage of Demons tier 1 mini-campaign. The group consisted of a Duergar fighter (from RoD), a half-orc barbarian, a dwarf barbarian/druid, a tiefling sorcerer, and a tabaxi bard, all between levels 1 and 4. Since this campaign operates under the … Continue reading Tomb of Annihilation: Campaign Diary Introduction
After completing "Forge of Fury", the adventurers had not all leveled to 5. This meant they couldn't start "Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan" as a group. We talked about options, and eventually we decided to run Out of the Abyss instead. That led to further discussion about whether or not to stick with Adventurers League for the … Continue reading Out of the Abyss: Campaign Diary 1
Unlike previous Adventurers League seasons, the Tomb of Annihilation storyline provides a set of introductory missions for tier 2 (levels 5-10) characters. The module here gives players a good taste of the sorts of enemies and puzzles they'll face in ToA, and in that sense it's quite good. But it shares some weaknesses with earlier DDAL … Continue reading DDAL07-02 Over the Edge (review)
Technoskald's Forge 