In Gothic Brunch a few weeks ago, the group determined they wanted to go do some research at a library. Now, what kind of a game would I be running if the library didn't have a secret basement with forbidden tomes and unspeakable secrets? For this map, I once again depended on Elven Tower. This … Continue reading Forbidden Level of the Creedhall Library
I've been thinking a lot about colonialism in D&D. How can we maintain the feel of exploration and treasure hunting without turning it into "taking stuff from 'evil races' because we are superior"? NB: This is an area where I have little to no expertise, so please understand that this only reflects my own growth … Continue reading De-colonizing D&D
As the Variant Roles Dragon Heist "mega campaign" has ended, I've started to think about what I want to do next. While we're still planning for Dungeon of the Mad Mage, that doesn't stop me from thinking about a homebrew dungeon-focused campaign. Principles In the meantime, planning has begun! I don't know yet if this will consist … Continue reading Principles and ideas for a dungeon campaign
Some time has passed since I sat down to take stock of my current calendar of games. I thought I might as well write it down here, for ease of finding it later if nothing else... Current Life As a professional adult, I travel for work fairly frequently, though not overwhelmingly so — about one … Continue reading Musing on my gaming schedule
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
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
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)
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
I have a group starting Tomb of Annihilation in the next week or two as we wrap up a run through DDAL07-01 "A City on the Edge". (That's why I hedge on the date - it all depends on how long we take to finish the last of the missions.) The actual hardcover has a pretty … Continue reading Tomb of Annihilation: Thoughts on structure
The first DDAL module for Season 7, "A City on the Edge" attempts to provide a pathway to the Tomb of Annihilation storyline at tier 1. It starts off a bit rough, though. As usual, this review contains SPOILERS, so the TL;DR version is "not bad". The introduction doesn't really tell us much about the actual adventure: … Continue reading DDAL07-01: A City on the Edge (review)
Technoskald's Forge 