When D&D 5th Edition came out, my gaming group launched two playtest campaigns. Obsidian Frontier was a sandbox campaign set in the early days of our homegrown city, Obsidian Bay. It was focused on trying out the new rules and running a typical D&D campaign. The second campaign was Heart of Darkness, a story-driven game … Read more
April 2017’s RPG Carnival topic is “Carnival of Megadungeons!”, during which the gaming blogosphere looked at this staple of fantasy (and occasionally science fiction) role-playing games. I suspect most gaming groups of a certain age have a megadungeon that they call their own — it’s a trope of Dungeons & Dragos that calls to us like dragons … Read more
Nuke(m)Con. It’s my gaming group’s homegrown convention which was first held in 2004 as an alternative to going to GenCon. It’s schedule was never formally defined, but for a while we had an every-other-year schedule going with conventions in 2006, 2008, and 2012. Then came the convention drought. It wasn’t for a lack of trying … Read more
The January 2017 topic for RPG Blog Carnival was “Prophecies and Omens”. Hosted by Tales of a GM it asked how the art of predicting the future can be incorporated into your campaign. It’s a hard topic for me because we’ve haven’t used prophecies and omens much in our campaigns. I’m not entirely sure why, … Read more
In prepping for my Saturday group’s D&D 5e playtest I created a dragonborn paladin of Bahamut named Bharosh Goldenscales. The group has been adventuring in the Wilderlands of High Fantasy and although this is mostly a mechanical playtest, I couldn’t resist building out a backstory. That meant figuring out how the dragonborn might fit into … Read more
It’s been a little over a year since my gaming groups started playing D&D 5th Edition. We began with the D&D Basic Rules when they were released in July 2014 and quickly moved to the core rules (Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, Monster Manual) as they released. My Sunday group ran two playtest campaigns during … Read more
Five years ago, I wrote about the dangers of the mega dungeon. Now my group has returned to Dungeons & Dragons, and I’m contemplating the role of dungeons in the campaign. Time has shown that the folks in my group aren’t big fans of mega dungeons, but I think we still enjoy the challenge of … Read more
I owe most of my esoteric knowledge of mythology, religion, art, and culture to role-playing game. Much of it was learned at the literary knee of Gary Gygax in the form of the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual, both of which were packed with strange monster names, advanced vocabulary, and random loot tables. In … Read more
One of the great things about Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition is the re-emergence of recommending reading lists. The new lists (Appendix E in the Player’s Handbook, Appendix D in the Dungeon Master’s Guide) are patterned after Gary Gygax’s legendary Appendix N from the original 1st edition AD&D DMG.
I played D&D at GenCon, got in a few play tests with my regular group, and bought the three corebooks: the Players Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master’s Guide. As I write this, my Sunday gaming group is playing D&D again for the first time since 2008. My lunchtime group is playing it.