A guide to Hexcrawling, Part 1
Truth is that if you have already played videogames such as Civilization, board games like Catan, or opened one of the D&D 5e modules, you have already seen some sort of hexmap. These typically appear to show great maps to ...
Five Commonly Confused Rules in D&D 5e
In my last article (Five Tips for New Dungeon Masters), my top tip was to “Know the Rules”. The rules are the skeleton of the game. You can flesh out the story all you want, but without a skeleton you’ll ...
Craft of the Game: Creating a Minimum Viable Product, P2
Tabletop gaming is filled with excellent ideas, but what happens when you have an idea that you want to share with others? The first step in doing so is creating a “minimum viable product.” At its core, a minimum viable ...
The Artificer Class, Part Six
Today I’m finishing my exploration of Rich Howard’s Alchemist class, with the Irezumi, Metamorph, Poisoner, Pyromancer, and Re-Animator subclasses. Have I mentioned that Rich created an impressive array of subclasses? The best part, though, is how none of them tread ...
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 ...
Creating a magic system for your game P1
A roleplaying magic system can be a pretty cut and dry thing: a spell list, damage, area of effect and so on, but if done correctly it can do so much more. Properly done, a magic system can be used ...
Managing time in your games
Fighter: This goes for killing our friend Boblin, the goblin! The fighter slashes the front of the hooded’s person torso, leaving a great trace of blood and fully removing the hood. This leaves the mysterious figure still ocult by the ...
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 ...
Social Combat (5e)
The following are some optional rules I have been working on for goal based social battles for Fifth Edition. I wanted something that would not take much work to learn, so I followed the framework of regular combat. Let me ...
How to make an Indiana Jones-like campaign
Thumbnail art by Rafael Chies Last month I finished Tomb of Annihilation as a player. Being a big fan of the adventuring style Indiana Jones-vibe genre in pretty much any media I completely adored the adventure. I am pretty tired, ...