This question gets bandied around an awful lot with new DMs. The fact that the game is titled Dungeons and Dragons sort of keys the prospective game runners that two things have to make an appearance in their game, otherwise it isn’t really a game of D&D. Leaving aside the reasons why every good game of D&D doesn’t necessarily need a dragon (editor’s note: dragons are indeed rad), the basic unit of D&D is, at least in my estimation, still the Dungeon. I’ve circulated in the forums and on Reddit and it seems to me that the idea of a good old-fashioned dungeon crawl is somewhat out ..read more

So, if you don’t follow me on Twitter it probably feels like I’ve been absent for a while now, and you’ve probably wandered away in the interim. Maybe you’re one of the die-hards who keep the traffic tracker rising, looking to see if I’ve posted anything new or cool to add to your D&D 5e game. I’ve got good news and bad news. Let’s rip the band-aid off right now. No, I don’t have any new monsters or treasure or that promised adventure for you. I’m a bad, bad man. Those adventures are shelved and while I have every intention of eventually finishing them, they still aren’t ready for prime-ti ..read more

I don’t have anything against the Petting Zoo People trope as a general rule. If you or your players are super excited about playing Tabaxi or Loxodons or Leonals or whatever, I completely support that flavor of fun. That being said, there’s more and more of a push in the direction of character options for characters who get further and further away from looking like they might fit into the stereotypical medieval Fantasy Land setting. I imagine that heroes, by their very nature, are kind of weird people. Otherwise, they’d get jobs rather than while away their hours stabbing evil monsters and l ..read more

It’s a battle for best tabletop roleplaying game map creator! Free vs Paid. Inkarnate vs Dungeon Painter vs Campaign Cartographer vs Wonderdraft. Let’s get ready to rumble! When I picked up my first real fantasy novel, The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks, way back in the Mesozoic era, I must have spent the first fifteen minutes poring over the map that appeared on the first page. It was pretty standard Left-Justified Fantasy Map with towns and forests and rivers and the dangerous northern reaches. There was a mountain that looked like a skull, a druid keep, a hall of kings, and a place calle ..read more

Have you played Blades in the Dark, yet? I saw a comment on Reddit about sports in Doskvol and u/LozNewman wrote the following little bit of magic and I couldn’t help but get crazy inspired. Roofball! A crazy combination of parkour and rugby. Goals are hundreds of meters apart, if the ball touches the ground, it’s “dead” and forces a new kick-off. If a player touches the ground, they have to go touch their goal before they can re-enter play (yes, sprinting along the ground is fine). The ball can be thrown, kicked , or punched. The same goes for your opponents. You can’t throw the ball forwar ..read more

Okay, so this is rather more personal than my last pitch, seeing as building this game is what’s keeping me busy while the world outside gets progressively more bleak. My wife and I have been systematically building this game out of the bones of another game that I’ve mentioned pretty often on the site, Blades in the Dark. If you’re familiar with that system, you’ll be right at home on this one. Court of Blades is a game of power politics, Renaissance magic, gunpowder diplomacy, and romantic skulduggery. It hinges upon characters designing a team of specialized problem-solvers for one of the n ..read more

With a name like that, I think we can probably dispense with the typical pre-Warstory palaver, don’t you? I’m taking a break from working on the content that I’m going to be doling out through the week, so forgive me if I just do what Scum & Villainy does best and smash to the action. When Last We Left Our Heroes (?) The crew of the Alleged Ship, currently hastily renamed “The Schmebulock” in the wake of a run in with the 51st Legion during an illegal Echo Wave Rider demolition derby-style space-race to win a pirate treasure stolen from Intergalactic MI-6, is celebrating their latest victo ..read more

So I had a friend of mine who came to me with an interesting request. They came to me with the idea that they’d like to be patronized–patron-ated– be-patroned? They wanted to make a deal with a couple of characters that they’d roleplayed with in a previous game. Now, these characters were basically Archfey, but we both agreed that the Archfey patron was a little bland. This player asked me to give a whack at homebrewing something for them. I like homebrewing as a rule, but it takes a really gentle touch to not just hand world-ending power to players. On the other hand, you need to capture thei ..read more

It occurs to me that I should probably learn how to use the scheduling features of this site before I make promises to have content auto-publish on a set schedule, otherwise I’m absolutely going to look like a fool when it inevitably fails to post when I say it will. That’s kind of the problem with having never done this kind of thing before. My wife was kind enough to set up the website and give me a platform to post this stuff, but I’m still very much learning as I go along. Secret projects are in the offing, the first free adventure is almost ready for primetime, Low-Fantasy Campaign Pitche ..read more

Today, I want to talk about a problem that I see arising in a lot of people’s games that never seemed give J.R.R. Tolkien trouble. The walk from the Shire to the Crack of Mount Doom, I think we can agree, was pretty exciting. It was fraught with danger, there were periods of tension and release, there was some marvelous scenery, and it provided room for narrative pacing. Things happened along the way. So, why is it that when there’s a journey ahead of our players, we want to either handwave it away completely or else give the party the requisite “random encounter” to simulate the dangers of th ..read more