Just want to drop a note for those who may not have seen the link on my patreon.  Posted a video on my youtube channel in which my players and I discuss whether or not "adventure" is the purpose of D&D.  This was recorded Friday the 19th, and I hope it's the beginning of a regular number of videos I make along these lines.  The players seem amenable to the idea. My choice to overlay the conversation upon my making a map of western Galicia, I think, is somewhat distracting from the debate, at least for me.  But then, it provides an extra facet to the video itself, hopefu ..read more

Still focusing on European regions, unfortunately, as there are difficulties researching other parts of the world — though perhaps we shall get there, we can start with a distinction between two types of backcountry: "hinterland" and "wilderness." We can define the former as those unkept lands that juxtaposed upon the rural heartland that surrounded villages, towns and cities. Apart from lands that were cultivated, there were many "wild" places that nevertheless served as sources for timber, foraged food, hunting and many other resources. This transitional zone was a realm that retained a deg ..read more

Bob in Ohio writes, I planted a hook that the players took and not sure how to run it. Civil war in neighboring state populated largely by Wood Elves. Players are familiar with the fact that it's going on but have only been tangentially effected. Now representatives of both warring factions have contacted the party wanting their charismatic high elf battlemaster about negotiating the peace between them. Suggestions as to how to handle? Answer: It's a good situation. I'd argue it's not the DM's problem. Have both sides back up a wagonload of gold, give the party to believe that there's ..read more

We've talked about subterranean environments and about towns ... let's talk about the thing that players interact with while moving from one to the other. During the medieval and Renaissance periods, roads were funded through a combination of methods. Royal or noble patronage played a significant role, with monarchs and nobles funding the construction and maintenance of roads as part of large-scale endeavors aimed at developing and improving the physical structures and systems necessary for the functioning of a society or region, in ways to enhance transportation, trade, communication and def ..read more

A little more than three weeks ago, I wrote about a piano I once had on another of my blogs.  And here it is: I wrote the earlier post on the day I learned that it might be coming to me, but I didn't want to say so as there wasn't any certainty.  Last week, however, upon acquiring the piano from her grandmother, my daughter assured me that she'd be storing it in my house, so once again this old familiar piano is back in my possession.  It's been 27 years. Took five professional movers to get this beast moved out from its former residence into this one, which tells me how ..read more

Bob writes, The HS where I teach has a gaming group that meets after school one day a week. The some middle schoolers (7th and 8th graders) have inquired about someone running D&D for them! Eventually word got 'round to moi and I'm contemplating it. The question is - how would YOU start. Assume players knew nothing of the game except what they've stumbled across in mass media. I'll have 1-2 hours per session. Answer: After introducing them to a collection of the odd shaped dice, letting them play with them for a bit, as they are quite strange, I'd briefly explain that each person was goi ..read more

With this post, I want to generally speak of the layout and appearance of towns in Medieval-Renaissance Europe, perhaps doing the same again for other parts of the world. The goal would be to convey how to describe a town to the players and give the space meaning in the players' imaginations. Many DMs don't like to run towns, or won't run them at all, I'm guessing because they're hard to describe or because it's difficult to set an adventure there. Whatever the reason, the more we know, the better equipped we'll be to explore this aspect of the game world. Medieval towns often grew around a c ..read more

The purpose of this blog post is not to describe a D&D dungeon, but to give a sense of what real caves would have been like for the time period, and then to translate that knowledge into a form that could be useful for a dungeon master in describing the underworld. This is not to say the D&D dungeons aren't meant to exist; they are! Yet the goal is for us to rethink the concept by going to the source materials first, rather than to the limited research that was available through libraries in the 1970s, when the dungeon trope was established. We know vastly more about caving now, and we ..read more

The next step in addressing practical advice for DMing would be to tell the reader, "Do you due diligence; read, research, study the material of the game world's time period.  Understand weapons and siege engines, underground environments, town planning, rural and urban social life, the organisation of authority, the church ... anything that helps install context and therefore ideas of how to describe things the players see. Making a world requires understanding how the bits and pieces of the game world fit together, so that we can establish a fine, complex structure that may w ..read more

"The DM, without telling anything like a story, describes a set of circumstances that the players see in the immediate here and now, that they're free to make a decision about ... The DM provides immediate context of what the player characters' senses tell them. The players make a MOVE. This produces a response from the DM, describing what has changed in the immediate context due to the players' move. Then the players move again...the ongoing description provided by the DM serves as the immediate backdrop for gameplay, providing the players with the information they need to make their mo ..read more