Mad Gaming Madness

I haven't posted in a while, mainly due to a high workload in my job. My shift is going to change in the near future, however, and I have been thinking about running a game on Saturdays once I'm freed up. One of the ideas floating around is a D&D 5E-based pirate game. I've got some ideas, but one of the things I did to prep was to actually start reading the PHB. I was heavily involved in the year-and-a-half long playtest, and I've realized that my "knowledge of the rules" is more a hodgepodge of rules/interpretations/snippets from several iterations of the playtest documents, rather than a knowledge gained from reading the book cover to cover. Heck, there's some older edition interpretations that I'm still using. Anyway, in reading the PHB, I'm seeing more and more where it looks like a product that was not fully playtested before it hit the shelves. During the playtest, they kept back a lot of content, only releasing the core races/subrace...

So, last year I got laid off, and as a result was incredibly busy for half a year until I could get another job. I meant to post something to the blog, but of course that was something I forgot to do. Anyway, I'm gainfully employed once again, and ready to do some posts. Back in Dragon  magazine issue #50, there was an article called "Self defense for dragons" by Gregory Rihn, where he argued that dragons in D&D were not powerful enough. In 1st edition AD&D, that was probably true; while other monsters got a "% in lair" value, only dragons had one to determine if they were asleep when the adventurers arrived. To add insult to injury, the 1st edition Dungeon Master's Guide specified prices for subdued dragons, and gave adventurers an incentive to enslave the creatures for additional profit. While they are considerably more potent in 5E, my experience is that creatures in the Monster Manual seem underpowered when faced with optimized characters. It...

This item is one I've used in games for almost twenty years. I remember an illustration of a magic-worker surrounded by streamers of incense, gazing intently into a mirror that was part of a box; I think I saw it in one of those 80s encyclopedias of the Occult which used to clutter the shelves of Waldenbooks and B. Dalton back in the day. In any case, the image stayed with me and I used it as inspiration for a fortune-teller my players visited in a marketplace. Since I portrayed a lot of fortune-tellers as shifty con-artists, a couple of players decided it was the box itself that was magical. I came up with the details of the potential magic item, but never needed it as more profitable larcenies occupied the group.

I was sick last week, so there were no updates. That gave me time to do a little work on some conversions I'd planned of classic characters from previous editions of D&D. Part of the fun of a new edition is converting favorite characters and seeing how they turn out. With the new edition's focus on simplicity, for a lot of characters I find the proper way to do a conversion that captures the spirit of the character is to start from scratch. That seemed to work pretty well with the classic characters I've converted: Aleena (from the Mentzer Basic Dungeons & Dragons book of 1983), Morgan Ironwolf (from the Moldvay Basic Dungeons & Dragons book of 1981), and Gutboy Barrelhouse (from the 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide of 1979).

So, I was fooling around online (as you do), and came across Dinkum’s Random Magic Item Generator from Rusty & Co. I let it spin a few times, and it came up with this: " Elven Drum of Armor. This slender hide drum surround the user with an unseen field of force, providing some protection while a rhythm is maintained on it. Additionally, the user sprouts pointy ears while wearing it. The protection doesn't stack with any armor the character may be wearing." A little whimsical for most campaigns, but I like using random generators to get the creative juices flowing and seeing where it goes from there.

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 .

By request:

Jason Fogleman posted a link to the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Facebook group about the Bobbitt Worm, an aquatic predator more properly known as Eunice aphroditois . It's a nasty creature, and has popped up in fish tanks and aquariums when owners add coral or other natural decorations that contains a larval worm. The attacks of the creature are particularly savage, and, as Jason put it, "This needs a stat block so badly... Small, Medium, and Large versions too." I'd love to oblige. Apologies to Shane Smallwood for stealing his idea for the creature's name.

So, personal stuff went past the weekend, which meant I was too busy to post a Monstrous Monday entry; those will resume next Monday. For today's Wondrous Wednesday, I'll post an item inspired by fairy tales and folklore (a source of inspiration heavily used by Gary Gygax back in the day): the rope of winds .

I figure, if there's " Monstrous Monday ," then why not "Wondrous Wednesday" where we post magic items? So, here's one that's I did decades ago, reimagined and reinterpreted for 5E: the minimaton .

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...

This year has been the worst so far, at least as far as dithering over my One Page Dungeon Contest submission goes. It's the same story every year: I have a million ideas, but none of them really gel, and as the deadline looms I end up polishing the shiniest turd just so I can get something done. Anyway, without further ado, I present Magic Shop Mayhem.

I read over on Tenkar's Taven about a Fundraiser for Charles "Chuck" Wright's Medical Expenses (he's the Frog God Ganes Art / Layout Director). He's got diabetes (as do I) and as a result is having surgery to remove all or part of his foot (which is something that can happen to the best diabetics). As gaming companies are not exactly swimming in capital, his friends in the gaming industry have gotten together to create a GoFundMe page to cover the medical expenses, and have donated a lot of fine PDFs and product that will be given away to random donors. As a fellow diabetic (albeit probably with better health insurance), I think this awesome, and I encourage anybody who feels like it to donate to the cause. You have a really good chance to get some free stuff (the list of "prizes" keeps getting bigger, which is awesome) and it's for a good cause.

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.

The new edition of D&D has inspired a large number of people to "roll their own," and with modern desktop publishing tools being available so cheaply (or even free), it should come as no surprise that a lot of it is really polished. Here are a few sites that I find particularly useful; I can't swear to the balance of all of their materials, but there are some great ideas in there and some very polished game elements I use myself.

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 realize I never posted the follow-up to my earlier post on magic items in Eberron . Well, Real Life bogged me down for a while, but I intended to post a "shopping list" from my group when they made it to Sharn. I'm still working on it. I've converted a bunch of the alchemical items and special substances from 3E and 3.5E, but it's taking a while to do minor magic items. I've stolen a few from this list to pepper my adventures, and I recommend checking it out. Below are the special items.

They snuck it up on me! They've restarted the biweekly Geomorph Contest over at Inkwell Ideas. They lost some momentum, I believe, when they put it on hold for GenCon (and I totally understand why -- they've got a lot on their plate for the Con, and I appreciated them putting it on hiatus over just not saying anything about it and leaving us in the dark). Therefore, they've extended the deadline for the current contest, which has the "building" theme. I had been watching, but when they didn't restart it right after GenCon, I kind of lost track. I'm happy to throw my hat in the ring again, although my stuff pales in comparison to the artists that submit stuff.

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.