Four Spells for Eldritch Knights
I’ve been thinking about the 4e swordmage class lately, and particularly how it both is and isn’t translated into the 5e Eldritch Knight fighter, Bladesinger wizard, and other weapon-and-arcane-casting classes (Valor bards, Pact of the Blade ‘locks, and Arcane Trickster ...
Blades of the Abyssal Forge
I’ve had this idea sitting in my list for a couple of months now, and I figure Halloween is as good a time as any to do something with it. A smith captures a bunch of different types of demons ...
A Ghoulish Repast
The ghoul has long been one of my favorite types of D&D undead. It doesn’t even matter that the original ghul of Arabian folklore is a demon instead. Cannibalism – especially a compulsion to commit same – is a kind of horror ...
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 ...
Eight Questions with Dan Dillon
I mention Dan Dillon reasonably often in my column, but if you haven’t already heard of him, he’s a game designer who has written for a ton of different companies, including Wizards of the Coast in the upcoming Waterdeep: Dungeon of ...
Defender Traits for NPCs
When I first saw monster stat blocks in the D&D Next playtest, and again upon the release of the Monster Manual, I was surprised at how much of a return to 2e-and-earlier form they resembled. They have some of the ...
Timing Reactions
Flattened by a cold, I can’t do justice to today’s intended topic, which was going to be the next part of the History of the Fighter. Instead, I’m reposting and touching up a piece from my personal blog, Harbinger of ...
Fey-Touched Backgrounds, Part Two
In the last article, I created Backgrounds for those who had been Captives of the fey, and Changelings who had been left behind by the fey. (Not to be confused with Eberron’s doppelganger-like race.) Today I’m continuing with the Courtly ...
Tribal Knowledge: Three-Way Conflict
One of the things I believe most strongly about game-running is that every conflict is more interesting with at least three sides. Their relative strength doesn’t need to be equal, but ideally no side is significantly stronger than the other ...
Fey-Touched Backgrounds, Part One
A few readers asked for fey-touched Backgrounds as part of my series on the fey (which will eventually be stitched together into a PDF that you can buy with real money, no fools’-gold need apply). I’ll be presenting six new ...