Howling Tower

I just returned from the annual H. P. Lovecraft film festival in Portland, one of my favorite events of the year. As always, that event got me thinking (more than usual) about how the “Cthulhu mythos” can be incorporated into a fantasy RPG campaign. The elder gods run into trouble when they collide with heroic […]

Dragons are the most iconic creatures in fantasy RPGs, for obvious reasons. They ought to be among the most impressive and frightening, too, but that isn’t always the case. It’s not because dragons don’t have the chops; on a stat-by-stat basis, your average dragon is terrifying. Yet player characters bring them down with shocking regularity.

Once upon a time, random encounters were standard fare in roleplaying games. Somewhere along the way, they fell out of fashion. Players, DMs, and game designers decided that random encounters embodied the worst of lazy DMing. They were indiscriminate party killers. Most of all, they were dumped because they were irrelevant to the ongoing story.

Journeys are part of the myths we try to capture in RPGs. From the Odyssey and Anabasis of the Greeks, to Huck and Jim’s trip down the Mississippi, to films such as The Hidden Fortress and Saving Private Ryan, journeys serve as both vehicles for adventure and as metaphors for the heroes’ movement toward self-discovery.

It’s taken as gospel by many fantasy roleplayers that in the bad old days, all campaigns were about dungeons. Characters left the dungeon and returned to town only for healing and to replenish supplies. They might have a few random encounters between the town and the dungeon, but those were nothing more than distractions from

By now, everyone has had time to settle into the idea that D&D is getting another revision. I’m using this week to look at some D&D history, what revisions mean, and their effects. Today’s episode concerns complexity and option fatigue. Every revision of D&D has made the game more complex somehow. Complexity comes in different

No, not that type of discrimination. Fantasy roleplayers love their nonhuman races. What started in AD&D with elves, dwarves, halflings, half-elves, and half-orcs has mushroomed into dozens of player-character races in RPGs. Players seem to have an inexhaustible appetite for more races to dabble with. The choices have expanded from humans through the so-called demihumans

Last week, we looked at three groups of spells that cause headaches for DMs. The first contains spells that let characters get from here to there without dealing with what’s in between. The second lets players see what’s over there, know what’s going on, or glimpse what lies ahead when that knowledge would otherwise be

Magic is all about warping reality to do the wizard’s bidding. It doesn’t matter whether you’re Drawmij, Harry Dresden, or Isaac Bonewits. The wizard wants or needs the world to be different from how it is and has the supernatural juice to make it so. The power to shape reality is what makes magic-users in

Some of you might be aware that roleplaying game industry veteran Steve Winter has started writing blogs about Dungeons & Dragons and other topics that interest him. His site, Howling Tower, already has some great posts that you should go read. As a special treat, we’re working with Steve to make some of his thoughts