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Paul Hughes

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Paul Hughes
duneguy

Paul Hughes

Paul Hughes reverse engineers and reassembles D&D rules at blogofholding.com. He's the lead designer on EN Publishing's Monstrous Menagerie and Dungeon Delver's Guide, and also tinkers with projects such as 5e Monster Manual on a Business Card and the Random Dungeon Generator as a Dungeon Map. He believes that any rule can be improved by running it through a simulator 100,000 times.
Dungeon Delver's Guide: Sample Dungeon
The Dungeon Delver’s Guide Kickstarter is coming into its last week! With over £150,000 pledged, we’ve unlocked several stretch goals. Let’s talk about those. Dungeon Delver’s Guide has a huge, 40-page section that lets you randomly create, tweak, and customize dungeons. But sometimes it’s 30 seconds before the game starts and you don’t want to spend the time rolling all those dice: you need...
Dungeon Delver's Guide: High Level Play
As campaigns reach mid to high levels, characters come into their own. A vast array of rare and legendary magic items await treasure hunters. Spellcasters gain access to varied and powerful spells. High-level class abilities offer game-breaking powers. On the other hand, at high levels, game masters find themselves with dwindling resources. There are fewer published adventures, monsters, and...
Dungeon Delver's Guide: Three Page Dungeons
We’ve launched our Dungeon Delver’s Guide kickstarter, and we’re honored by your support! A day after launch, we’re at over £60K. Soon we’ll have stretch goals to announce. But right now, let’s preview another section of the book: our three-page dungeons. If you’re designing a dungeon adventure for your game, we’ve got you covered. If you’re creating one from scratch, we’ve got solid dungeon...
Dungeon Delver’s Guide: Skeletal Hordes
Welcome to Dungeon Delver’s Guide (coming to Kickstarter very soon!) Our skeletons are smart, have extra arms, are indestructible, and are on fire. I love designing Level Up monsters (you can check out a whole book of ‘em here), and I couldn’t resist writing lots of new subterranean beasts for Dungeon Delver’s Guide. Besides myself, monster designers Cassandra Macdonald, Peter N Martin, Sarah...
Dungeon Delver's Guide: Let’s Go Shopping
A descent into a dungeon is not to be made without preparation. For players who love shopping-trip sessions, Dungeon Delver's Guide (coming to Kickstarter on August 30th) offers loads of new equipment, from the mundane (collapsible boats and underwater lanterns) to the spectacular (alchemical oil that can temporarily set your weapon alight, transforming a sword into a flametongue). We’ve also...
Dungeon Delver’s Guide: Welcome to Underland
What’s below dungeons? According to fantasy trope, the depths of the earth harbor a vast network of caves. In Dungeon Delver’s Guide (coming to Kickstarter on August 30th), we include a gazetteer of Underland, a primordial cavern realm that is unsettling, unfamiliar—and best avoided by all but the most seasoned adventurers. Standing apart from mere cave adventures, Underland locations are...
Dungeon Delver’s Guide: The NODES System
You’ve baited your story hooks. You’ve got your dungeon map. Now what do you put in all those rooms? Creating an adventure’s worth of interesting features at once can be challenging. You may encounter writer’s block, or find yourself filling each area with repetitive challenges. (A dungeon where every room contains hostile monsters is one of the most common ruts to get stuck in!) In these...
Dungeon Delver’s Guide: It’s a Trap!
In EN Publishing’s upcoming Dungeon Delver’s Guide, we’re giving you every tool you need to build story-driven, atmospheric dungeons. And that means we have got to get traps right. Today I want to share the book’s trap-building philosophy, along with a few of the more than a hundred traps you’ll get when you Kickstart the book later this year. Traps are a defining characteristic of dungeons...
Level Up’s Archlich: The Mouthless One
With millions of people watching Stranger Things this month, you might be curious what the Level Up version of an archlich might look like. Well, we’re working on one for an as-yet-unannounced project, and we thought we’d give you a preview. If you want a truly challenging end boss, give it a try. Just don’t blame me if your characters learn secrets they weren’t meant to know...
Spellcasting Monsters in Level Up
One of our goals with the Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition Monstrous Menagerie was to make enemy spellcasters less of a pain to run. With an updated stat block format, we've made it possible to run a complex battle without looking up spells in another book or online resource–all while working as expected with existing spells and features like counterspell and antimagic field...
Level Up’s Monsters: Ecology
In another post, I talked about the updates we’re making to monster stat blocks in Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition. Today, I want to talk about the changes we’re making to the rest of the monster entry. RPG bestiaries generally accompany a monster’s game statistics with an essay about the monster’s appearance, ecology, lore, and place in the world. We’re doing that too! I hope that most of our...
Level Up’s Monsters: The Stat Block
Hi! I’m Paul Hughes, a lead developer on Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition. At blogofholding.com, I’ve done statistical analysis on the Monster Manual (5E Monster Manual on a Business Card), character class damage, monster Challenge Rating, treasure economy, and so on. We’re publishing a heroic fantasy RPG, so we need monsters. A whole damn book of them. I want to tell you a little about what we...
Class Balance In A5E: How Much Damage Should A Damage Dealer Deal?
In Level Up: Advanced Fifth Edition, we’re creating new incarnations of the 5e character classes. Before we build our new classes from the ground up, we need… a teardown of the originals to see how they work! Our design goal is to produce characters of approximately the same power level as the ones in the Players Handbook. We’ll need to do some math to figure out the targets we’re shooting...

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