Running a Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) campaign can be an exciting but challenging endeavor, especially for a new Dungeon Master (DM). In this guide, we’ll address some of the most common questions new DMs have, divided into five key sections: Overall Game, Campaign, Session Prep, World-Building, and Running the Table. General Newbie Dungeon Master Questions What D&D Homebrew Content Should I Allow in My D&D Game? Homebrew content is a great way to knock the rust from a game system that’s become repetitive, even stale as you play it game after game, year after year. So really, the ..read more

Welcome back or welcome to the blog for the first time! This time, I want to show off another example of grabbing the microscope and dialing in the magnification to zoom in on our world map with some more detail. I showed off an example of this work once before by region hex mapping The Gyre. So give that a look as well. Primarily what we’re interested in here is how to take the biomes present on our atlas-scale world map and impose more detail, and thus variety, to one of the world’s continents. Yep, you read right. I did the same scaling demonstrated in The Gyre for an entire continent! And ..read more

Welcome back! So far in our top-down worldbuilding series we’ve created a world map, put down some landmarks, and even drafted up some borders for the different political states. Now it’s time we turn our attention towards the human element of our geography. Who are the people who live in the different regions of the world and what are they like? It’s a tall order and honestly, any world building attempt to model the nuance of human existence and sociology is going to be incredibly reductive at best. So keep that in mind as we work on this! I find the best way to approach this topic, and most ..read more

Not that long ago I ran across, or rather, ran across again, Sly Flourish’s overview of Frank Mentzer’s Dungeon, a sort of replayable or infinite dungeon for D&D. It was something I shrugged off as novel but inconsequential when I first saw it. Likely because it was focused on Basic D&D, BECMI D&D, which was not something I was interested in playing or running at the time. However, now that I’ve had years of running more games and put a lot of effort into making a useful DM’s Binder, I better understand the usefulness of backpacker resources, the sort of things included in my DM B ..read more

Welcome back, or just welcome if it’s your first time here! Today we’re continuing our worldbuilding process series by taking a look at language mapping. For the uninitiated, we’ve been creating a series of blog articles detailing steps on worldbuilding a world/setting for D&D and other fantasy TTRPGs, primarily through top-down worldbuilding. You can find all the blog articles and supplemental resources here.  Great, let’s get into it! What is Language Mapping? Good question. Veteran world builders are familiar with the “monoculture” cliche. For our fantasy TTRPGs, it means boiling d ..read more

Welcome back; I recently reviewed my DND overland travel notes for the Solo RPG live stream we’ve been doing on Twitch. As I was checking my notes and thinking about what might happen during Lia’s multi-week travel from Split Valley Oasis to Karjunton, I realized I haven’t made a blog discussing what preparation would actually be helpful for a player character engaging in DND overland travel.  If you haven’t checked it out, we’re running a solo D&D 5e adventure, and you can catch it live on Twitch. Or, if you want to catch up on everything in the story so far, you can see the previous ..read more