This weekend, if all goes to plan, will be five sessions into The Keep On the Borderlands. We're somewhere near the mid-point depending on how deep into the Caves of Chaos the heroes want to plunge, so it's worth putting some thought into if we want to continue beyond it, and if so what we want to do. Some possibilities…

Call It a Game
The object ( Read more... )

Pondering the game session tonight, and what if any refactoring I should do. The party is one malnourished kobold away from hitting 3rd level after two sessions ("Dammit, 5E!") and they've simultaneously barely scratched the surface of the Caves of Chaos while jumping to the "bottom level of the dungeon" (i.e., the topmost caves). I feel like I ( Read more... )

Okay, it's not that dark. And it's also not that secret. But here it is anyway:

I don't want to be the DM.

I mean, I do sometimes, sure. I've been a DM fairly regularly since 1981 or so, so I must get something out of it. I even have a Gamemastering Credo. But the thing is, the reason I'm usually the DM is not because that's what I want out of ( Read more... )

Woke up at oh-dark-thirty from the most explicitly Lovecraftian dream I can remember having- not just in the sense that it contained otherworldly monstrous horrors (which it did), but also in that the true horror was not at what the dream showed as what it implied. For all the corn of reading a Lovecraft story, that sh!t's pretty darn scary when it ( Read more... )

First of all, sirfox might find this particularly interesting: Weirder Fantasy.

Second of all, I've been doing a lot of thinking about the Sandbox vs. Railroad and Unlearning 3E Habits issues highlighted by my recent sessions. This led me to further rumination on the idea of What Is the Game About? 3.x (and especially 4E) put an unwarranted focus on " ( Read more... )

In my post about difficulty the other day, I tossed in a random joke-not-really-a-joke sobbing about the fact that the characters are primed to hit 5th level at the end of the next session, and that it was too soon. It occurred to me after the fact that once upon a time (i.e., back in my 1e/2e days) hitting fifth level would not be cause for alarm ( Read more... )

The current scenario in my Silver Coast game, as initially written and run for the first two sessions, was a study in the limits of 5E encounter design. And it taught me some very interesting things- not the least of which is that 5E can be just as painfully grindy as 3.x and 4E, when the difficulty is skewed way up and the tactical setup is the ( Read more... )

When thinking about how the Silver Coast game has gone so far, I have been struck with the relative lack of danger your characters seem to have been in. Some of this has been smart play: when confronted with things that seem dangerous, you've mostly avoided it, and you've tricked your way out of some pretty sticky spots. But a lot of it seems to be ( Read more... )

So the other day Lone Wolf floated that they planned to support 5E in HeroLab. Given what a power-user I've been of Hero Lab for Pathfinder and Savage Worlds, I find myself remarkably blasé about this announcement ( Read more... )

Last night's Silver Coast game entailed the final smashing of the Redcloaks. ( The session began... )