Mad Gaming Madness

As a service for my readers (the few, the proud...), I thought I'd spotlight a very useful blog called North of Reality . It's a fiction blog written and edited by Uel Aramchek, and it is just chock full of fantastic inspiration for fantasy gaming. Each entry is a snippet of his bizarre, wonderful imagination, and many of them have gaming application -- in fact, they're written in a way that I think he games in his spare time. For narrative gamers (using, say, Dungeon World), many of the entries could be used as written (look at, for example, The Understeel ). The next time your group finds a potion, choose something from the archive that's been tagged " bottled goods ." Introduce binari into a remote city's economy. Some snippets are dripping with potential character backstories .

Apparently, several Old School bloggers do something called Monstrous Mondays, where they stat up a monster for OSR games. I run and play D&D 5E right now, and it could use a few new ones. The game has been out for a while now, but the release schedule is slow, and a lot of effort on making monsters in the 5E Homebrew community either revolves around converting monsters from previous editions to the current one, or converting monsters from other properties (video games, movies, etc.) to the RPG side. Here are a couple of good sources I've found online: Chris Delvo does the Monstrous Mondays challenge on his blog. Some of them are conversions, but he's got new stuff, too. As an added bonus, he collects the monsters every month and adds them to a pdf compilation . The /r/MonsterADay community of Reddit.com had a huge series of monsters (mostly original) created by users /u/StoneStrix , /u/Thalate and /u/Solbera . The community's gone quiet recently, but it's s...

One of the mainstays of the Eberron setting is the idea of communities, both inclusive/organic (settlements, cities, organized religions) and exclusive/artificial (secret societies, cults, criminal gangs). In the 3.5E rules, the Eberron Campaign Setting book introduced the Community domain for clerics, designed for a cleric to encourage group effort. The one saint in the canonical material that characters can actually meet is devoted to this domain. This is my attempt to convert the essence of the 3.5 domain to 5E. There's not much too the 3.5E domain: just a list of spells, a diplomacy bonus, and calm emotions once per day. 5E domains are far more defining and grant far more power than that. I worked this one from the ground up, with some help from a few ENWorld commenters.

I've been a fan of gnolls for years. Most recently, under 4th Edition, Keith Baker wrote an article about playing gnolls ; since I'm a huge fan of his Eberron setting, as you can imagine, I'm very familiar with his work. I made the following conversion of gnolls into a playable race, informed by the Monster Manual , but not slavishly bound to it. It should be pretty well-balanced.

I've always been a huge fan of artist Dave Trampier , and loved his comic strip Worm y , which ran in Dragon magazine from 1977 to 1988. Wormy had a great story and depicted a fascinating world, the realm of Mascentia. While it was the standard generic-fantasy D&D world, the strip told stories from the point-of-view of the monsters -- sentient, intelligent creatures with drives just  like humans, who had to deal with the occasional overzealous "adventurers" who invaded their homes, slaughtered their families and made off with their hard-earned belongings. When 5E D&D was still in playtest, one of the first races I homebrewed was the trolls; most of the protagonists of Wormy were trolls, after all.

So, the next bout of Inkwell Ideas' Geomorph Contest is "tombs/a tomb." I think I can do this.

So I had another idea for a geomorph for Inkwell Ideas' Geomorph Contest . I'm a big fan of Stonewerks' village geomorphs , which can be used to make an instant fantasy village (or, with a little work, a modern country village). I thought I'd make a tile in that style as an homage.

This time around Inkwell Ideas' Geomorph Contest has the theme of "a shrine."

So, Inkwell Ideas has started a biweekly dungeon geomorph contest , and they've gotten some great results already . The idea is, they give a theme every two weeks, and you have those two weeks to submit up to 3 geomorphs; it looks like they're giving away nice prizes, too, such as their DungeonMorph Dice , or Chubby Monster Games’ Moleskin Maps . I thought I'd play along.

So, I was directed to this cool site recently: Tabletop Audio . It's a site with many ten-minute soundscapes to play during games. The site tags them pretty well, as to whether they've got ambience (i.e., rattling chains, water dripping, etc.), minimal music (nothing with voices), or both. The list of soundscapes is pretty extensive, everything from Sleeping Dragon, to Strangers on a Train, to Warehouse 13. I've been trying it out, and it's easier than making my own playlists of sound effects using Softrope , which is what I had been doing. The soundscapes are 10 minutes long, and loopable.

So this year, I had several really good ideas for my One Page Dungeon Contest submission. Sadly, my imagination was captured by the material in the thread " Ten Foot Poles: How Do They Work? " on RPG.net, and especially the idea of the Most Ancient and Worshipful Order of Roodsmen and Pole-Tenders that we developed there. As I was driving one of my DMs home last week, I suddenly had the idea for my submission -- the Vault of the Pole, the testing ground for apprentices of the Guild who seek to become journeymen. I pictured apprentice pole-tenders (called "tenders") frantically trying to overcome the obstacle course in a series of dungeon rooms while a deep sonorous bell tolls every minute or so. And so, that's what I went with.

One of the fun things to play in 1E D&D was a half-ogre. Basically, the archetypical half-ogre was big and dumb, and you're only job was to hit things. Locked door? Bash it open. Hobgoblins threatening the party? Hit them until the fall down. Subtlety was lost with this character; but that was the point -- if you DMed a game, and someone wanted to play a half-ogre, you knew they didn't want to talk to the townsfolk or rub elbows with the nobles; they were only here to kill things and take their stuff.

One of my favorite supplements from D&D 4E was Heroes of the Feywild , which really opened my eyes to how to run adventures in the Realm of Faerie. And one of the fan-favorite parts of the book was the new race section. I ended up having a number of Pixie player characters at my table over the years. I was impressed with the work done on them -- despite the potential for abuse or the possibility it would end up terrible, they actually made pixies playable and interesting, with unique-but-not-overpowered abilities. They got my seal of approval. With the advent of 5E, I was pleased to see the Pixie and Sprite in the Monster Manual . They have apparently decided the two races are related but slightly dissimilar -- Pixies are essentially nonviolent versions of Sprites, with a few magical abilities changed out. While the new edition has an emphasis on simplicity and the Pixie definitely isn't a simple race, I think they can still work as a PC race option. Below the cut, I ...

Races Changeling Kalashtar Shifter Warforged Backgrounds Dragonmarked Scion Feats Dragonmarks

So, the new edition of Dungeons & Dragons has started dropping ( Player's Handbook last month, and I got my Monster Manual last night). I've been running this on Wednesdays at 7:00 PM at Maplewood Hobby for the last two years (three years in February) during the playtest, and as time has gone by I've been more and more impressed with it. It's very similar in feel (to me, anyway) to the original Basic Set D&D (and I'm talking about the purple box with the Erol Otus cover, so B/X for any OSR people) which was the most "fun" version. But the mechanics are very streamlined and simplified -- gone are different-methods-for-different-tasks, instead we're using the d20+bonus>target number method, which makes things easy.

I posted a long time ago about the Order of the d30 . Well, there's been more traction on that front of late, with a Google+ group . Also, Rich Leblanc has posted a link to a Mediafire folder with the sigil in a variety of formats. I may have to make a t-shirt!

As I've done the previous three years, this year I produced an entry for the One Page Dungeon Contest . This year's entry came in just under the wire; I had four different ideas that I worked on at one point or another, then I went ahead and completed one I started in 2011 and never finished. Inspiration is a fickle mistress.

This year, I originally started with something different, a modular starport sheet with associated Visio file, so you can make starports in minutes. In my sci-fi home game, this is something I need that I've always intended to make; I thought the One Page Dungeon Contest would spur me to finish the idea. Unfortunately, I didn't really have an adventure in there - it's basically more of a GM tool. And the contest is for a "Dungeon," so...

I like to have a lot of pre-gens for the D&D Next (040213 Playtest Packet) tables I run at the local hobby shop, because sometimes everybody at the table wants to play a martial character (and that should be allowed so that we can see whether or not it works in playtest) but there's only a couple in the packet. So, I went through and made as many unique pre-gens as I could earlier in the week. Sorry if they look rushed.

Apparently, they published all of the 2012 One Page Dungeon entries in one handsome volume ! I'm thrilled! There's some great stuff in there!