These Are the End Times

The world has ended. The great kingdoms have fallen, and their cities lie in ruins. Far to the north the forces of Law clashed against the forces of Chaos, and were defeated. But in their moment of triumph the armies of the invading barbarian hordes overreached, and lost control of the dark powers that had […]

I Don’t Know, Does That Look Like 11 Hit Dice To You?

Apropos of Delta’s discussion of big cats in D&D, I suddenly realized after all these years that a saber-tooth tiger was nearly as many HD as a red dragon.

Bell Curve vs. Linear

Here’s a handy little chart showing the difference between a linear distribution like rolling a d20 and a bell curve distribution like 3d6 when it comes to rolling versus a target. The first column is the d20 roll, the second is the approximate percent chance of rolling that or less on d20. That’s pretty obvious, but […]

Overland Travel Rates

The following are some hopefully useful templates (mostly based on Delta’s discussion of the rates in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1e Dungeon Master’s Guide). They show the cost to enter1 a hex on the overland travel map, with a key to how many hexes a party can move in a day based on the degree of […]

How To Hexcrawl

+Joe Johnston released How to Hexcrawl: a nice little pay-what-you-want primer on running a hex crawl in Labyrinth Lord, or any other D&D-like, gathering together the rules and charts you might use as well as some advice. What I want to talk about, though is how to handle checking for encounters. Joe correctly points out […]

Trollsmyth’s Death & Dismemberment Table, revamped for 5e

I’ve long been a fan of Trollsmyth’s Death & Dismemberment table for D&D-like games… Arduin’s Critical Hits are more amusing, but quite a bit deadlier than I’m usually willing to play with (though I read somewhere recently that the way Dave Hargrave used them they were only 1 in 400 chance… a 20 followed by […]

Goblins of Salmagundi

A new race for D&D 5e Goblins are evil, or at least mischievous, creatures, no two of whom are alike. Skin, eye, and hair color vary as do number and arrangement of eyes, limbs, ears, mouths, etc. Every goblin should roll on the Goblin Random Features chart (see bottom of post). Goblins are often employed […]

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

So, the 1st level Sleep spell in D&D bugs me. I don’t actually mind that it’s an encounter-ender for low-level characters… in fact I regard it as a bigger problem that 1st level MUs don’t really have any other spells nearly as worthwhile. Maybe Charm Person, at least outside of a dungeon, but that’s about […]

D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge

Doing this all in one post, ’cause I can’t be bothered to schedule a post a day for all of Feb. 1: First person who introduced you to D&D? Which edition? Your first Character? I picked up the original “White Box” D&D from the local game store, before anybody else I knew had ever heard […]

Simple Combination Classes

Here are some rules for adding simple combination classes to old-style D&D and retro clones. (This is what I do in my D&D inspired house campaign with the kids.) Basically the idea is that players are free to choose to be dual classed, and each combination has its own name and role, and one or […]