Developing a Language for Your Game
(Author’s note: The idea for this article came about when I was talking with some people on a social media site. I hope you enjoy it!) Tabletop RPGs are filled with races and many times their languages fall into one ...
The Single Race Campaign P1
When a DM starts a new game with a single race available, you might think that that severely limits your choices. But does it truly? In some senses, yes it’s true. Yet in others, this is not necessarily so. A ...
Additional Human Variants
For… almost as long as I’ve been writing Harbinger of Doom, I’ve been talking on and off about how we talk about humans and, as a result, non-humans in fantasy roleplaying, especially D&D. That linked post is very dated at ...
Avians – Racial Option for 5e
I came up with the avians race when we were looking at racial options to put into the Seas of Vodari book (fully funded on Kickstarter). While it looks like we’re going with other racial options in the book, I ...
UA: Races of Ravnica Breakdown
Like a lot of people, my money was on this month’s UA being the Artificer, but I guess that’s coming in September. Instead, we get four new races from the upcoming Ravnica setting. I’m excited about Ravnica overall, for virtue ...
A look at character attributes and race
Part 1: Disabilities In most games in order to create a character you need to possess certain levels of various character attributes. But instead of saying that “due to X race (or monster) not having an attribute level of Y, ...
Living Clay People
I play a lot of fantasy 4X games. This shouldn’t surprise you; I wrote an egregiously long series on domain management games! Well, okay, there are wildly more games in the genre than anyone could play, and I don’t have ...
Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes Breakdown
As you probably know, Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes doesn’t go all that deep on player-side mechanics, just a few races and subraces, but that makes it ideal for this week’s article. If I have extra writing time, I may touch ...
UA: Centaur and Minotaur Breakdown
For this month’s Unearthed Arcana, we have two new races, the centaur and the minotaur. As the document notes, this is their second run at the minotaur. The first was in the mist-shrouded reaches of 2015, when they also gave ...
23 Types of Elves
What is considered to be an elf/elvish varies widely by culture, time, and setting. Elves can show up as everything from the Tolkien-esque to creatures others would identify as trolls. Here are twenty-three ideas for making interesting elves to your ...