Tribal Knowledge Archives - Tribality

Your Dungeon Needs Chaos Gates

Brandes Stoddard — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 21:07:02 +0000

Supergiant released a little vidja game called Hades, and folks, it is simply incredible. Yes okay it came out in December of 2018 – I didn’t play it until this year when it came to the Nintendo Switch. (This post isn’t a review, but you can take the BAFTA’s word for it.) It’s a roguelike with procedurally connected rooms. In addition to the ordinary 1-3 ways out of any given room, there are also Chaos Gates and Erebus Gates, and […]

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Leomund’s Tiny Problem

Brandes Stoddard — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 02:04:19 +0000

Today I want to talk about Leomund’s tiny hut, which for brevity I’ll be calling LTH for the rest of this post. 5e is the first edition in which this spell has shown up highly exploitable, so I’m going to start with some history and end with a spread of solutions. It’s cool if LTH isn’t a problem in your group, but I’ll get to why it is one for other groups. AD&D 1e (Sorry, not hunting through OD&D right […]

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Five Magic Items for the Circle of the Moon

Brandes Stoddard — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 15:52:04 +0000

Way back in that Twitter thread, I talked about the function of totems as 4e magic items. I suggested that they could be intended for druids, especially the Circle of the Moon, and might boost the stats of lower-CR Wild Shapes, so that if shapeshifting to a wolf or panther is your preferred style, you’re not missing out on the much better hit points and attacks of higher-CR shapes. Nathan Dowdell suggested that they might “grant specific, unique wildshape forms… this silver […]

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Long-Term Pursuit

Brandes Stoddard — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 21:13:51 +0000

In a conversation with the inimitable Samhaine, we discussed having PCs lead the overland escape of a large group of NPCs – think of it as the Fellowship shepherding the people of Rohan from Meduseld to Helm’s Deep, the travelogue format of zombie horror, or the terrestrial version of Battlestar Galactica’s constant, harrying pursuit. This isn’t directly modeled in the DMG’s chase rules, which are intended for a short-term urban or wilderness chase. They’re more about your running speed than […]

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Alternate Barbarian Rages

Brandes Stoddard — Thu, 05 Dec 2019 13:00:24 +0000

Both Colin and my friend Stephen have done some great writing about barbarians, thanks to the experience of having two barbarians in the party at the same time. You should definitely read what they have to say, but the short version that I care about for this article is that barbarian rage is sort of a non-choice. If you’re not raging, you’re a subpar fighter-type. If you are raging, your tactics become tightly constrained. This article is a touched-up and […]

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How Do We Teach Game-Running?

Brandes Stoddard — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 13:18:18 +0000

A friend’s Facebook thread got me thinking about how the sweet science of game-running is taught and refined. Now, as you likely know, I’ve been writing for Tribality for more than four and a half years, and helping GMs hone their craft is a central element of our mission statement. But I also read a lot of online conversations in which (presumably) experienced players and GMs talk down to new players and GMs. This ain’t the way. In this post, I’ll touch on […]

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Seven New Magic Items

Brandes Stoddard — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 15:59:56 +0000

I hope y’all like it when I post collections of largely unconnected magic items, because that’s what I’m doing today. These were originally posted in Harbinger of Doom, and appear here in an updated form. Scrolls of the Aegis Maleficarum Scroll, rare The learned sages of the Imperial City, who work in the light of the Holy Fire, pen these delicate scrolls – fragile, precious, and as terrible as angels. The scroll itself is three inches wide and two to […]

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The Give Ground Reaction

Brandes Stoddard — Thu, 09 May 2019 13:27:50 +0000

Way back in February of 2013, during the heady days of D&D Next, I created the Give Ground rule, a reaction that is available to all creatures, and posted it in Harbinger of Doom. That was back before any of us knew what 5e’s formal rules language would look like. My group has used this rule steadily since then, so today I’m cleaning up the phrasing and offering it here. Give Ground As a reaction when you take damage from […]

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Five Kinds of Plot

Brandes Stoddard — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 12:00:04 +0000

Many years ago, I wrote an article for Harbinger of Doom on five kinds of plot found in tabletop, live-action, and video games. Because it was for my personal blog, it heavily emphasized LARPs that formed a (reasonably) common language within my friends group. For Tribality… well, I’m much less confident that those portions of the text are useful. This, then, is an update that draws on more recent properties, such as Critical Role – not a universal text, but […]

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5 Tips for Time Travel Stories

Brandes Stoddard — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:58:24 +0000

Quite a while back, a friend suggested that he’d like to see a post on how to run good time-travel stories in roleplaying games. I originally posted these in Harbinger of Doom – if not an exhaustive guide, then five pointers to make your time travel adventure manageable and fun. I’ve always loved the convoluted logic of these stories – Time Traveler’s Wife is one of my favorite books, and I enjoy Primer even though I’m not smart enough to grasp it […]

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