By Kobold Staff Jul 22, 2019 | Articles, Monsters |
These aggressive, blue-black freshwater crabs inhabit rivers and streams, scuttling along the muddy terrain in search of prey. Strangling Claws. Garroter crabs are named for their abnormal right claws, which have evolved over time to strangle prey like a barbed whip. Clacking Hordes. Their long whip-claw is lined with powerful muscles and joints at the beginning, middle, and end that give it great flexibility. During mating season, thousands of...
By Jacob Huebsch Jul 19, 2019 | Articles, The Far Side of the Table |
Kara’s chest flared painfully with each breath. Next to her, Strass’s left arm hung uselessly at his side. Thick, muscular tentacles lay around them, writhing as if still controlled by their monstrous master. A few dozen feet before them, the kraken lay defeated, its great yellow eyes unmoving. Nearby, Azreal tended to the large gash running across Val’s chest. A whirlpool surged suddenly at the center of the strange ship graveyard,...
By GM Lent Jul 17, 2019 | Articles, The Sorcery Stop |
Supernatural boons might take the form of blessings or charms, providing worthy characters with some small benefit—the equivalents of wondrous items and potions. Such gifts are great fodder for quests and provide a venue both to make a character feel special and to circumvent attunement limits in a minor way. Supernatural gifts make the magic of a world feel more real with a quantifiable and concrete approach. Stories and legends, however, are...
By Mike Welham Jul 15, 2019 | Articles, Expanding Codex |
The Expanding Codex series fleshes out monsters from the Creature Codex, giving GMs ways to modify the existing monsters to surprise well-prepared players or to introduce monsters to a campaign. Alternate Traits and Actions The following changes allow GMs to alter an arcanaphage without modifying its challenge rating. Diviniphage. A diviniphage feeds solely on divine magic but still interacts with all types of magic. It is immune to damage from...
By Kobold Staff Jul 12, 2019 | Articles |
Remember when the Kobolds brought you nearly 400 brand new monsters last year with the release of the Creature Codex? Those were great times. (I wonder how many battles that book launched? How much shiny loot it gave out to victorious parties? How many characters it put into the grave?) Well, it’s just been nominated for an ENnie in the Best Monster/Adversary category! Congrats to the authors—Wolfgang Baur, Dan Dillon, Richard Green,...
By Robert Fairbanks Jul 10, 2019 | Articles, Out of the Frying Pan |
Encounters have consequences. Every slain bandit has friends who will want revenge, and every devil banished back to the Eleven Hells reports its failure to its dark lord. What happens when the PCs’ daring deeds come back to bite them? The Wandering Roads of Dornig The following encounter chains are more than just random conflicts. Each event flows organically into the next, sometimes without giving PCs the chance to catch their collective...
By Kobold Staff Jul 8, 2019 | Articles, Monsters |
The air crackles and lights flicker in the ruins. In a whirl of colorful robes, the drifter materializes from the unfathomable maelstroms of time. His eyes scan the hall in panic, anticipating the terrible revelations of yet another era. Adrift in Time. Not much is known about the time traveling eonic drifters other than that they left a dying civilization to look for help not available in their own age. To their misfortune, returning to their...
By Richard Pett Jul 5, 2019 | Articles, Warlock's Apprentice |
A maze within a maze within a maze… Every minotaur whispers its name, senses its presence, wonders at its complexity, its enigma, its beauty—the First Labyrinth. To them, the Plane of the Great Labyrinth is just one facet of all mazes, and all mazes are one. Their darkest secrets, their greatest treasures, their deadliest dangers, all may be found beyond the next turn or through the next portal. The Darkest Vaults of the Great Maze The First...
By GM Lent Jul 3, 2019 | Articles, The Sorcery Stop |
Magic is the lifeblood of fantasy. Arguably the dividing line between fantasy and other types of fiction, magic can be strange, mysterious, frightening, comical, or anything in between. And if you’re looking to explore the applications of magic in a fantasy roleplaying campaign, you want to visit the Sorcery Stop! Playing fantasy RPGs, we tend to simply accept as given many minor magical effects that to a commoner would seem truly incredible....
By Kobold Staff Jul 1, 2019 | Articles, Midgard |
The Plain is filled with human nomads who call themselves Khazzaki. They are followers of Svarog and Khors and Perun and Sweet Golden Lada, though Svarog is their patron. Their cities are built of tents and flesh and rope and the people are often driven from their chosen site before the wind, but they are no less formidable for that. Their master, the Khan of the Khazzaki, rules from the City of Wheels. His nation stretches wherever hoof beats...
By Hannah Rose Jun 28, 2019 | Articles, Designing with Style |
The Designing with Style series breaks down the official 5th Edition style guide to help designers create content that’s well-written, polished, and precise. Using consistent language for rules and mechanics makes it easier for new players to understand the game and helps to avoid confusion that slows play. For example, the range of hold person is 60 feet, but the spell text still specifies that the target must be “a humanoid you can see within...
By Lou Anders Jun 26, 2019 | Articles, Midgard |
You’ve picked up the Tome of Beasts or maybe the Creature Codex. Maybe you have the Midgard Heroes Handbook. You were thinking about just dropping these monsters into your homebrew or adding those subclasses. But you keep hearing about this Midgard place, this amazing campaign setting that everyone’s talking about. So you take the next step. You get the Midgard Worldbook. So You Want to Play in Midgard? And wow. You had no idea. What a richly...
By Kobold Staff Jun 24, 2019 | Articles, Wallpapers |
It’s summer! So here’s a cool set of wallpapers for your computer, your smartphone, or whatever electronic device you’ve got. This month, we’ve got a piece from Deep Magic: Winter Magic by William O’Brien. Let’s stay frosty, adventurers! ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Please, click on the image you want to download to expand it into a downloadable...
By Jacob Huebsch Jun 21, 2019 | Articles, The Far Side of the Table |
It was a sunny, clear day in Greychapel. A light breeze carried the smell of last night’s rain. Markus, Holly, and Sebastian stood outside the Goldfinch Inn, soaking in the atmosphere around them. Markus laughed, struck by the difference of the fine day before him and the dark, cavernous sewers that they were trudging through the night before. With full purses from last night’s success, the adventurers set off to do some well-deserved shopping...
