We are getting fewer and fewer usable alternative names for flunkies. “Henchmen” is too gendered and henchpeople just doesn’t have a nice ring to it. You can’t say “minion” without thinking of the little yellow guys. And don’t even get me started on the word “goon”
If you ever have to completely improvise a megadungeon (for some reason, may god have mercy), find a map of a large, asymmetric shopping mall, preferably with multiple levels for the layout.
Another method for improvising a dungeon: imagine the layout of your elementary school and use those hazily recollections for the dungeon. This has a few advantages.
If you ever have to completely improvise a megadungeon (for some reason, may god have mercy), find a map of a large, asymmetric shopping mall, preferably with multiple levels for the layout.
Find the directory and use individual stores as loose prompts off of which to riff. American Eagle? Maybe the nest of imperialistic birdfolk. Hot Topic? A cult popular with the youth in the nearby village. Etc.
🗺️ Hexcrawl Checklist: Part One
The “West Marches” as a type of D&D campaign was born 15 years ago today. I have put together a checklist of everything you need to run your own hexcrawl campaign, inspired by the West Marches style ⤵️
My earliest big house rule I ever implemented in 5e D&D was sort of similar to this but (obviously) much better. It was popular enough within the very large, multiple GMs, West Marches campaign that it was adopted across the board and in other campaigns as well. It’s simple… 🧵
🚨New Blogpost: D&D Initiative & The McDonald’s Problem🍔
Does your combat take longer than it should, causing players to zone out when it isn’t their turn? Try this one weird trick (Coastal Wizards HATE him) 🧵
Best D&D dungeon design practice is to include multiple entrances and exits, but not enough people know that one of your entrances/exits should have a gift shop
Consider history and factions throughout play, jotting down thoughts (especially thoughts from your players). After the first session, you can ossify these loose connections into something solid enough for long term play.
A sleight of hand has occurred with respect to the legacy of Jennell Jaquays, one of TTRPG’s most important early figures. Anne at DIY & Dragons definitively lays out the case why you should keep “JaquaySing” your dungeons in Xandering is Slandering
The first is that your memory is going to be from a better perspective for describing it to people exploring it. You don’t experience real life spaces as a top-down map, it’s all POV. Even better, since your memories are from childhood, the space is going to be larger than life
The “can only maintain concentration on one spell at a time” rule in D&D 5e was a big quality of life improvement BUT HOWEVER casting like 5 different buff spells before a big fight did have this vibe, which felt cool
Powergaming in D&D 3.5e compared to powergaming in D&D 5e is so funny.
In 3.5, making a broken build is like, “Take this race, these feats from these 8 different source books, these classes and prestige classes, cast these spells before combat even begins.”
5e: “Take Fireball.”
Apparently today’s discourse is whether you can use D&D 5e to run a romance/dating sim?
Without opining on whether you *should*, here is a quick and dirty hack to instantly make 5e character creation lead to more interesting characters in that sense: 🧵
The cover of Traveller is obviously iconic, but unfortunately I can now no longer see this many ellipses without reading it like it’s a baby boomer posting on Facebook
This is Nana , calling anyone … Happy, Birthday …
In pseudo-medieval fantasy games, characters often understand the world much better than actual medieval peoples. Europeans from Aristotle until the 17th century thought mice just spontaneously generated from moldy grain. We know better, but would the people in your setting?
It also likely won’t be perfectly remembered, which gives you some flexibility. Maybe you remember that there was a little fake pond in the front—that can be a jumping off point for embellishing it into a flooded room with koi swimming between your legs as you wade through
I love the idea of converting office buildings into apartments for two reasons:
1. Office bad, housing good
2. It is good dungeon design. The best dungeons have an original use and are then hastily converted to another purpose, sometimes multiple times
🚨New blog post: The TTRPG Cooking Minigame 👨🏻🍳
I love minigames in TTRPGs, and cooking is the ur-example for a good minigame in your mostly fighting and exploring focused game like D&D and its cousins. A simple system for your game 🔗⤵️
Your memories are also likely to involve more senses than just sight. Which areas smell musty, which ones are always cold, which ones have lights that flicker unnervingly?
🚨You can now check out Barkeep on the Borderlands, a pubcrawl pointcrawl adventure, for yourself on itch dot io! Link, and a bit of explanation, below ⤵️
🚨 New Blogpost: Shopping in D&D is Garbage, and How to Fix It 🛍️🛒
Two minigames for making shopping in TTRPGs between dungeon delves more exciting, even addicting 🧵
🗺️ Hexcrawl Checklist: Part Two
In the follow up to my first part of a checklist for everything you need to run your own hexcrawl campaign, I focus on the most important elements that don’t appear on the map ⤵️
A friend told me that buying dog toys is often more exciting for the dog owner than playing with said toys are for the dog.
This dynamic is obviously analogous to gamemasters buying TTRPG supplements ostensibly for the players in their game but really for themselves.
If you want your DnD game to be realistic, and the characters encounter orcs, instead of fighting each other they should realize they have more in common than they differ and will unite to topple the monarchy.
There are so many cool fantasy creatures in roleplaying games yet not once have I seen stats for people with preposterously large fruits for heads—a real opportunity for your campaign
🚨 New Blogpost: Social Monsters 👯♀️
One reason that combat is the bulk of what D&D is about is because the ability of the enemies to do physical harm is graphically detailed, but focus is rarely given to how monsters can be social antagonists as well 🧵
AI has started scrapping even RPG blog posts for content. Was looking for an old post of mine and google now hides it under a mangled summary of my post. Artificial intelligence is a fucking menace. If you want to license my words, pay me first
🚨 New TTRPG Adventure: Trouble in Paradisa 🏝️
A system-agnostic murder mystery adventure based on a Lego theme from the 1990s, Paradisa, which focuses on tropical leisure.
Weapon and armor restrictions in D&D are more interesting if they are only social restrictions or taboos. Like, sure, a wizard *could* wear armor and a cleric *could* wield an edged weapon, but they will be pariahs in the wizard or cleric community and shunned by polite society
🏆 Inaugural Bloggies! There were a lot of great TTRPG blog posts in 2022, and this is a chance to highlight some of them and award a few as the TOP BLOG POSTS OF 2022. But first, you need to help pick them🧵
Yes, your dungeon should be Jaquaysed but it should also feature a grooving area. Where do the dungeon’s monsters get down? It’s important for the ecology of the entire subterranean labyrinth
🚨 Pre-launch Page for my ZineMonth project, Barkeep on the Borderlands, a system-neutral pubcrawl pointcrawl adventure is LIVE 🍻
Go follow, retweet, etc! Like, comment, subscribe, etc
🚨New Blogpost: Humpty Dumpty Should Die: Fixing Falling Damage in D&D 🍃
D&D’s “1d6 per 10 feet” rule has survived for decades and many editions. And Gary Gygax is probably mad about it. Here’s why!
I love logging onto ttrpg twitter after a long day of work and everyone is like “so here is my take on romance and hotdogs in D&D” with zero context of why that’s today’s hot topic
Errant, your new favorite D&D, is finally available to purchase! It’s one of my favorite games and I’ve had many near death experiences (mostly just my character’s death) playing it. Go grab it!
A hotel hosting an industry conference would make for a great grimdark dungeon crawl. Random encounters of stuffed suits with glazed, empty expressions shuffling along drab-blue, labyrinthine corridors, ravenous for blood and networking
If Tomb of Horrors is a purposely unfair module to “test” the skill of the players, what is a hard to run module that would similarly serve as a test of skill, but this time of the GM running it?
The rumors are true. Prismatic Wasteland Incorporated is in talks with Wizards of the Coast to purchase all intellectual property rights for “Dungeons & Dragons”
When Gandalf calls Shadowfax “the lord of all horses”, is that a literally true fact or just how he greets an old friend? I’d absolutely greet a friend by being like “Hark, it’s John! The lord of all horses!”
This happened to me and I found out there is a medieval peasant stan twitter. They didn’t like me citing Aristotle (to be fair, I didn’t like it either)
Let all old medieval superstitions of the past be true, but the people believe what we believe about how the world works. And just as often as in the past, they’re wrong. I think this actually lines up pretty well with a fantasy setting. After all, witches and ghosts are all real
🚨 See Early Drafts of my RPGs Alert 🚨
I have been working on Prismatic Wasteland, a whimsical dying earth TTRPG, my take on both D&D and Gamma World, for 3+ years. For the first time, I’m letting people who aren’t me gawk at it 🧵
As everyone who reads her blog (especially the post in question) knows, Anne is tremendously thoughtful and the insinuation that she wrote this for “clicks” and not because she was morally outraged at the shameful attempted erasure of another trans woman is insult to injury
I would like to believe that Anne is sincere in what she posted, but, regardless, I'm unsurprised to see someone trying to get cheap clicks by appealing to outrage culture over this. Such is life on the modern internet.
Let the players and their characters assume they know how the world works, but let it be wrong. Perhaps in your world everyone from peasants to philosophers “know” that mice reproduce similarly to humans. But in truth, mice spontaneously generate from moldy wheat
🚨 blog post! 🚨
unconquered (2022) plagiarized swaths of ideas and passages from ultraviolet grass lands & the black city (2020) and vaults of vaarn (2021)
more below 1/2
On reaction rolls, someone asked how to differentiate between aggressive and hostile encounters
Aggressive is someone who just plain doesn’t like you—the aggressively unhelpful TSA agent or the other bar patron that says “I don’t like you. He doesn’t like you either.” 🧵
🚨New Blogpost: In Defense of Ability Scores 🎼
Pathfinder 2e is getting rid of ability scores, which is absolutely the right call for that game. But for games not based on 3e D&D, ability scores are having a bit of a mechanical renaissance. Full post below!
A Knight at the Opera wrote a spicy review of Mothership 1E. Trust me: it doesn't say the same thing as all the other reviews of Mothership you've seen or read
🚨 New Blogpost: Potion Clues 🧪
Don’t just give your players a potion and tell them what it does. Information should be earned! But it also must be earnable. Here are 3 ways for D&D characters to identify the bubbling beaker they found in the dungeon ⤵️
The initiative die were:
Spellcasting? D12
Weapon? Damage die
Moving? D6
Anything else? D8
Roll both and take the higher result. That’s your initiative. Higher is faster. Dexterity score breaks ties.
Initiative is rolled each turn