Dungeon Masters in D&D 5E don't necessarily have a lot of tools to manage factions, NPCs, and long-term dangers. The Dungeon Master's Guide provides lots of excellent advice on creating villainous NPCs, but I personally need more. I've used Fronts from "Dungeon World" pretty extensively as a way to organize various Dangers with their Grim … Continue reading Progress clocks in Dungeons and Dragons
In "Gothic Brunch," my Sunday streamed campaign taking place in Krevborna, the characters are currently investigating an assault by drowned zombies that walked out of the lake. Players include @EmKHansen, @TheNerdyNiffler, @PaterVoss, and @MatthewWForeman, and they all do a great job bringing different aspects of this world to life! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwKUGN3iHqE I knew I wanted them … Continue reading Kipling’s Laboratory
Emmessi Tome by Craig J Spearing For an upcoming campaign focused on hunting monsters, I started putting together a list of variant or house rules I'd like to use. Some of these are "official variants" directly from the books; others come from friends; and others are things I just wanted to include. The current version … Continue reading Draft of variant rules for a new campaign
A while back, I spent a lot of time looking at how to run D&D Fifth Edition in an "old school" manner. Others have made the case for a long time that 5e already does this quite well with few to no changes. I feel like some of the options the game already presents can … Continue reading Old School Fifth Edition Ruleset
After I wrote recently about procedural generation for dungeons, my brain kept chewing on the possibilities here. I decided to try the process outlined in the Dungeon Masters Guide (5e) Appendix A. This post will run through my experience doing that, as well as a look ahead at what could come next. Random layout The … Continue reading Worked example of a procedural dungeon
In a dungeon crawl adventure, the characters have different goals: finding treasure, not killing monsters. In fact, if you can get through the dungeon with minimal risk, so much the better, because the payoff should be the treasure. Combat serves roughly the same purpose as traps: an obstacle preventing the characters from getting to their … Continue reading Experience for treasure
I started playing Dwarf Fortress again recently, partly inspired by the videos produced by Kruggsmash. He does a wonderful job of extracting the story from a fortress, illustrating it in a cartoonish way, and pulling out a narrative. But a lot of that narrative comes from the game systems, influenced by player actions, through procedural generation. That … Continue reading Coming back to procedural generation in D&D
As previously noted, the first half of Tomb of Annihilation largely consists of a hex crawl. This means that, outside of keyed hexes with static encounters, the game in this portion consists of procedurally-generated content. Do the adventurers get lost? Do they have enough supplies? Do they have any random encounters? For my own needs, I … Continue reading Tomb of Annihilation: Hex crawl procedure
As I recently launched a Tales from the Yawning Portal campaign, I thought I'd evaluate the Sunless Citadel encounters according to the difficulty guidelines in the Dungeon Masters Guide page 82. My encounter difficulty analysis for Lost Mine of Phandelver did basically the same thing. In this case, I work from the assumption that the group … Continue reading Encounter Difficulty in the Sunless Citadel
So now we've had the D&D Fifth Edition core books for a bit. Many bloggers have written many words about their impressions and evaluations, sometimes in great detail. But as I look at the shelf to my right, one of the three stands out more than the others. The Player's Handbook covers the core mechanics of … Continue reading On the 5e core book set
Technoskald's Forge 