If Ori can make notes in his final moments, you can, too. I generally try to avoid ranting in these articles, but please, if you are a player: take notes. As a DM, I have played with many, many brilliant players over the years. Some are quiet, some are energetic, some are hilarious, some are proper thespians. But the absolute best players take notes. In my experience, maybe only one in five do. Here are some crap reasons for not taking notes: It takes too long. It really doesn’t. I don’t have anywhere to write them. BS. Someone else is doing it. Keep reading for why this is completely wrong ..read more

I have long fantasized about a D&D product that empowers you to run a whole campaign. Published adventures are great, but they don’t necessarily make your life easier: there’s a lot of reading, planning, and prepping to do, and they are often very restrictive and railroady. You shouldn’t have to read a novel to run a campaign. I have only ever run one homebrew campaign from 1st to 20th level, and it followed a very loose structure, one session at a time. We started small in a gloomy little village called Gimmerton and gradually grew out from there. By the end of the campaign, the party had ..read more

About a month ago, I wrote a post about the practicalities of raise dead (and with it resurrection and true resurrection). One of the issues I touch on is component costs: specifically, diamonds. It got me thinking: how many other spells are there with expensive components? How often do we handwave these things—and should we? In the 2014 Player’s Handbook, 53 spells require a material component with a cost attached. That’s one in eight, approximately. Of these, 28 consume the component when cast. Should we care about this? Rules as written, yes—but I don’t think any of the groups I’ve played i ..read more

This post is a Patreon exclusive! For the full version, follow this link and subscribe. I recently came across the idea of a psychological gesture from Justin Alexander of the Alexandrian. This is a technique created by Michael Chekhov where actors use a physical action to capture and express their character’s main emotional or psychological state (Alexander himself is a classically trained actor). I’ve been trying it out a bit, and it’s fun and really helps me get in character quickly.  I came up with 50 (almost) psychological gestures for a range of NPCs based on species, class, alignme ..read more

If you’ve ever given your D&D world serious thought, you have probably, at some point, come up against this conundrum: Should the world level up with the players? For example, at 1st level, the adventurers are probably dealing with monsters of CR ¼ and below: goblins, skeletons, giant rats, and so on. Do 20th-level characters encounter such creatures, too? And vice versa: what are the chances of 1st-level characters stumbling upon a lich, or an ancient red dragon? How you answer this question probably says something about what type of DM you are. If you envision an open world where adventu ..read more

If you’ve played D&D for any length of time, you’ve probably been there. Something goes wrong, a few dice rolls go awry, and then, all of a sudden, somebody’s character is dead. Not unconscious: dead. Now what? I’ve written before about death in D&D. In my opinion, death should matter. It shouldn’t be routine. In fact, I’d go so far to say that ‘routine death’ is one of the reasons I can’t get on board with OSR games, where life is cheap and you’re only ever a few rolls away from a new character. Why care about a character if they’re completely replaceable? But I digress.In this articl ..read more

This is part two of a Patreon exclusive! You can read the full article here. Last week we explored arctic, coastal, desert, forest, and grassland environments. This week, we’ve got a few more: Hill Mountain Swamp Underdark Underwater Urban Again, I’m interested mainly in five key things: Placement (where is this environment found?) Characteristics (what is it like?) Examples (from our world if possible) Culture and society (and how the environment might influence it) As a fantasy setting: what adventures take place here? Let’s dive in! Hill As with mountains (see below), hills are more of ..read more

This is a Patreon exclusive! For the full article, go here. I’ve been reading a lot about worldbuilding and map-making for a while now, so I thought I would put some of my notes in one place. Obviously, a fantasy world doesn’t have to be ‘realistic’, but using real-world climatology can help make it consistent and complete—two of the four Cs of good worldbuilding. This post has gone through a few iterations. Initially I set out to look at the Köppen climate system and why different climates appear where they do, but I paused this because it was all a bit too granular (it has 30 subtypes). Then ..read more

I recently encountered this post by M D Presley on ‘The Four Cs of Fantasy Worldbuilding,’ and it sparked my imagination. Specifically, the idea of a fantasy conceit: a way in which a fantastical world deviates from our own (real) world. Presley points out that a fantasy world need not have many conceits to hold our attention. The Wizarding World of J K Rowling has maybe three: Magic exists Otherworldly creatures exist Ghosts exist In all other respects, Harry Potter’s world is really not that different from ours. But what about the world of D&D? D&D has quite a bit of worldbuilding ..read more

A few weeks ago, I wrote about some of the most well-regarded adventures in the hobby, and it reminded me how much I love running campaigns. My last, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, was epic: it ended in May and lasted the best part of a year. Before that, I ran a 20-level homebrew campaign in lockdown, and before that, Tomb of Annihilation and Curse of Strahd (among other things). We’ve just welcomed a new wyrmling to the world, and I’m in no rush to start something new—yet. But at some point in 2024, it would be cool to get back in the DM chair and kick off a new campaign. What follows, then, are s ..read more