Speak With Dead #35: Lingering is Such Sweet Sorrow
Coming to you from across the cosmos tonight, our in house advice columnist, the Necromancer with the Answer, has collected a few letters from folks with death related problems. Tonight, Maxillae the Mad draws out two questions and offers her sage counsel. Stay tuned after the...
Speak With Dead #34: Meat Drive
Coming to you from across the cosmos tonight, our in house advice columnist, the Necromancer with the Answer, has collected a few letters from folks with death related problems. Tonight, Maxillae [caption id="attachment_76032" align="alignright" width="300"] Dirge Singer is a prestige class from 3.5 D&D found in...
Speak With Dead #33: Garden Variety Toes
Coming to you from across the cosmos tonight, our in house advice columnist, the Necromancer with the Answer, has collected a few letters from folks with death related problems. Tonight, Maxillae [caption id="attachment_41067" align="alignright" width="210"] Careful consideration is the key to this encounter. Unless characters are...
Speak With Dead #32: Mismatched Hands and Beating Hearts
Our next installment of Speak with Dead. Coming to you from across the cosmos tonight, our in house advice columnist, the Necromancer with the Answer, has collected a few letters from folks with death related problems. Tonight, Maxillae the Mad draws out two questions and...
Speak With Dead #31: All of My Love and Resentment
Bringing back a blast from our Nerdarchy Past. Welcome back to Speak with Dead series. Coming to you from across the cosmos tonight, our in house agony aunt, the Necromancer with the Answer, has collected a few missives that require advisement. Tonight, Maxillae the Mad draws...
Stealing MMO Mechanics for Your Tabletop — Blackfathom Deeps
Salutations, nerds! Today I’m sharing ideas for stealing mechanics from MMORPGs, how to make them work and an example my players enjoyed. Suffice it to say your mileage may vary. I’m going to be dissecting Blackfathom Deeps from World of Warcraft. On top of being an extremely long dungeon there some really good concepts to steal from this dungeon and a couple of things that just wouldn’t translate well.
Pocket Full of NPCs for 5E D&D — The Reclusive Researcher
Salutations, nerds! Did your fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons party forget to take identify? Got no wizard? Need a nerd who they can go to for the cleansing of cursed items or simply require a plot hook to motivate the party delve into the ruins of an exploded wizard lab? I’ve got a character for you.
Recognizing How 5E D&D Characters are Not Regular People
Salutations, nerds! I’m having a debate right now with one of my friend groups about why everyone in a Dungeons & Dragons world isn’t a wizard if wizards are so powerful. If people in your world can blow up a quarter of a city all at once with giant balls of fire and wipe out whole armies ten why does everyone not do this? Because the barrier of entry for being a high level spellcaster is prohibitively high for most people. Then why are so many D&D player characters spellcasters? Because D&D player characters are not regular people.
How Did Your RPG Character Learn Their Skills?
Salutations, nerds! Your character sheet has a list of things you can do and after you’ve been playing your character for a while you have a pretty good idea of the skills they’re good at and the ones you really don’t want the Game Master to ask for checks. Something that might never come up at the table but will absolutely inform getting into your character’s head space and roleplaying is how you learned those skills in the first place.
Pocket Full of NPCs for 5E D&D — The Way Guardian
Salutations, nerds! Do you ever need to make a quick jaunt through the deep dark woods more interesting and yet still go smoothly enough to get to your destination in the same session? The last pocket NPC for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons I presented was the Lingering Spirit and today I’ve got a new one for you.
Exploring RPG Character Strengths and Flaws as Two Sides of the Same Coin
Salutations, nerds! Today I’m writing about your tabletop roleplaying game character’s greatest strengths and biggest flaws and how sometimes it helps to have them come from the same place. I don’t mean where you put your highest and lowest stats but instead your character’s personality.
5 Persuasion Skill Challenges for 5E D&D
Salutations, nerds! This series touches on each of the skills on the fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons character sheet and lists off five flash encounters for each of them. The idea is you can drop these into your game at any point without them taking up too much time or serving as longer plot hooks. These are single scene skill challenges, beginning to middle to end, right there. They exist if you need to stretch the action for a moment or give spotlight to a 5E D&D skill heavy character. Right now we’re talking about getting people to do what you want them to through Persuasion.
Dissecting the 5E D&D Undead Creature Type
Salutations, nerds! Today I’m going to be taking a look beyond the grave into the realm of necromancy and necrotic damage in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. Undead creatures are the bad guys you can reach for when you don’t want your heroes to have to think too hard about the monsters they’re killing.
Dissecting the 5E D&D Plant Creature Type
Salutations, nerds! Everybody who plays fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons has probably adventured in the forest at one point or another. It’s a staple fantasy backdrop. And what does a forest have in abundance? Plants. Trees, underbrush, bushes, briars — all sorts of things that grow. Even if you’re not in the forest there’s still farmland with crops and that one dandelion poking through the sidewalk in the city yelling, “Yeah, cobblestone!” But sometimes the plants turn around and want to kill you, and today’s post is about those 5E D&D plant creature types.
Dissecting the 5E D&D Ooze Creature Type
Salutations, nerds! I’ve been waiting to donk around with this fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons creature type because while I’ve already covered my favorite creature type — fey — this one is my spouse’s favorite. I’m referring to oozes of course. Slimy, lurchy, squishy and rolly, there are not a lot of these available in 5E D&D (there is really only so much you can do with them) but they are unique enough to merit their own creature type.
