Creating material for roleplaying games isn’t the same as engineering a new smartphone or finding ways to speed up an assembly line. Those tasks are tethered to the real world. The most revolutionary manufacturing idea ever conceived is in fact worthless if it depends on technology that can’t be built. RPGs, on the other hand, […]
Warlock’s Apprentice: An Ode to Randomness Read More »
These spells are suitable for a campaign that visits the City of Brass or that takes place in a setting where fire, heat, and the desert loom large, such as the Southlands. They’re geared toward wizards, but there’s no reason why sorcerers and warlocks—or even clerics and druids—can’t have access to them if you decide
Warlock’s Apprentice: Spells from the Fire Read More »
The Wilderness The cardtography method can be used to lay out a wilderness area just as easily as a dungeon. All that’s needed is an encounter grid tailored to your particular wilderness. Creating the grid isn’t much more difficult than building a table of random encounters since that’s essentially what it is. A wilderness area
Howling Tower: Cardtography and the Wilderness Read More »
Multi-Level Dungeons We’ve covered the basics of how to lay out the cards, how to connect the cards, and how to decide what each card represents in a simple dungeon. In this installment, we look at ways to create a more involved, multi-level complex. If we’re talking about a dungeon (and for the time being,
Howling Tower: Cardtography and Multi-Level Dungeons Read More »
A Simple Dungeon The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate why playing cards are such a potent choice for generating our environment. We didn’t choose cards as our randomizers because they’re somewhat room-shaped. That’s a happy coincidence. The real reason is because they have information embedded on them, and we can use that information
Howling Tower: Cardtography, a Simple Dungeon Read More »
Cardtography: The Basics Since the introduction of computer RPGs, randomly generated dungeons are everywhere. Software developers prefer to call them procedurally generated rather than random because they aren’t truly random; they’re created according to a rigid procedure. Developing a procedure that spits out satisfying dungeons is a popular problem among programmers, and the web is
Howling Tower: Cardtography Read More »
This installment is about deconstructing dragons. The Monster Manual contains 20 chromatic dragons, 20 metallic dragons, 1 shadow dragon, and 1 undead dragon. The Tome of Monsters and the Southlands Bestiary introduce several more. With all those stat blocks spread over three books, you’d expect to find plenty of variety—and you’d be right. But even
Howling Tower: Monster Stats, Part 5 Read More »
This installment, you get a break from graphs and formulas—though not entirely. In honor of Thanksgiving, I had to include some pie charts. Instead of plotting trends, however, this time we count how often certain concepts occur throughout the Monster Manual, to help you get a handle on whether they’re common, uncommon, or rare. Before
Howling Tower: Monster Stats, Part 4 Read More »
In part 1 and part 2 of this series, we looked at ability scores and hit points. In this installment, we look at damage output for official fifth edition monsters. First, a note about how I calculated damage output (average damage per round, or DPR). This topic is covered in a good amount of detail
Howling Tower: Monster Stats, Part 3 Read More »
We’ve been very pleased with the positive reaction to the Tome of Beasts previews, even—maybe even especially—when readers point out places where we’ve added numbers incorrectly or overlooked a modifier. In a few cases, however, readers have called out features as errors that we don’t consider errors at all. Instead, they’re cases where our philosophy
Monster Philosophy Read More »
In Part 1, we looked at ability scores and established a few useful rules for assigning them to monsters of your own design. In this part, we look at Hit Dice and hit points as they relate to challenge rating and extract a few lessons about monster defenses.
Howling Tower: Monster Stats, Part 2 Read More »
In the year since fifth edition came out, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time deconstructing its monsters and putting them back together again. The lessons I’ve learned have been invaluable when developing new creatures for third-party monster collections such as Fifth Edition Foes from Necromancer Games and Southlands Bestiary and Tome of Beasts from
Howling Tower: Monster Stats Read More »
This is the final installment in a series of six articles for players hoping to get the best possible experience from their time around the RPG table. Roleplaying game rules are wonderful things. I’ve spent decades pulling them apart, refining and polishing every piece, and putting them back together so they purr and growl like
Howling Tower: Rules Are Your Frenemy Read More »
(This is the fifth installment in a series of articles for players hoping to get the best possible experience from their time around the RPG table.) “Adventures, in retrospect, are pieces of extremely bad luck that missed a fatal ending.” ―Lawrence Griswold, Tombs, Travel and Trouble It’s a shame that Lawrence Griswold isn’t better known
Howling Tower: Expect Things to Go Wrong Read More »
This is the fourth installment in a series of articles for players hoping to get the best possible experience from their time around the RPG table. “… Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive―it’s such an interesting
Howling Tower: Dive Into the Unknown Read More »
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