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Welcome to the third installment in Jerry’s Diablo 3 to D&D series of blog posts. You can read about skill runes and treasure pygmies (the first two parts) before starting with socketed items. How It Works Aside from whatever magical properties armor and weapons has, most items function in only a few different ways. That’s …
Welcome to the second installment in Jerry’s Diablo 3 to D&D series of blog posts. You can read about skill runes first, if you want, or dive right into this week’s topic: treasure pygmies. Ah, treasure pygmies. Here’s another bit of Diablo 3 that any fun-loving group of gamers should readily enjoy at their tables. …
Adventure hooks are those little clues that DMs drop here and there to attract characters to particular adventure areas, usually the ones the DM has invested considerable time and energy into detailing. They can take many forms (more on that below), but what’s important is that they tantalize the players enough to whet their appetites …
Let me preface this series of articles by introducing myself. My name is Jerry LeNeave, and I’ve been addicted to games far longer than I care to mention. I run a blog over at The Dread Gazebo, help run the show over at Obsidian Portal, and also co-host the Haste podcast. I’ve been playing video …
My first efforts as a DM were with published D&D adventures: D1–3, Descent Into the Depths of the Earth, Shrine of the Kuo-Toa, and Vault of the Drow. We bombed through the series in two marathon sessions. Those adventures produced great moments and great memories. I still shudder, however, when I think about some of …
Meatspray. That is the nickname my fighter earned within the first hour of playtesting D&D Next. Granted, as a player I naturally lean toward exploiting the rules—ever play Street Fighter 2 and get pinned in the corner by Ken or Ryu and then subsequently kicked over and over again into oblivion? Yeah, I am that …
Delving into the Caves of Chaos with a New Iteration of D&D Read More »
My experience with the D&D Next playtest process over the past few months has been nothing short of amazing. My players and I have really come out of our shells, so to speak. Characters are developing more than ever, emergent storytelling is at the forefront of our games, and—most importantly—referencing game materials and rules has …
D&D Next: Shaping up to be a cookbook full of recipes for “Awesome” Read More »
Our Kobold-in-Chief Wolfgang recently had the chance to interview Mike Mearls, who is the Senior Manager for Dungeons & Dragons R&D at Wizards of the Coast. With the Open Playtest for D&D Next beginning today, we thought you might like to find out more about what’s going on with our beloved roleplaying game. Wolfgang: D&D …
When swords & sorcery heroes come up against cosmic horror, there is a chance that the characters themselves will catch a whiff of the universe beyond, whether or not they want to. Most horror games deal with that corrupting influence through some type of psychic decay or sanity countdown. Such mechanisms aren’t well suited to …
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. …
Gods and demons are a vital part of the swords and sorcery genre – as are their followers. Conan battles evil priests while swearing, “By Crom!” Elric surges into combat promising blood and souls for his divine patron Arioch. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser often find themselves pawns in the schemes of Nehwon’s conniving gods. …
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. …
Curse that Whispering Homunculus! Yesterday he took over Kobold World Headquarters and wreaked all sorts of havoc online. We finally got control back, only to find out today that while the Homunculus was in charge, he used the Kobold presses to publish his own book. Yes, you can now buy Your Whispering Homunculus in the …
Your Whispering Homunculus, Now In The Kobold Store Read More »
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. …
Howling Tower: The Road from Dullsville to Thrilltown Read More »
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 …
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