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I just got a private message from a friend and gamer at my table that he's stepping away from our D&D/RPGs. It makes me sad to hear. I've been DMing for a long time, and I've seen it happen. I've burned out for periods of time. I'd like to think I run great games, but I also realize not everyone...

It's been 18 months since our last campaign started, and now it's time to begin anew with a pirate campaign. Thought I'd share my pre-game setup, before it gets "gamerized." Always curious how others setup, but it's come a long way since it was me + some high school buddies crammed around a...

As an 18-month long campaign closed with a climactic boss battle yesterday, I began thinking about epilogues as I've got a couple weeks (real life breaks) to come up with a way to satisfactorily wrap up a story that has enriched us, seen plenty of character development that I never could have...

Attached are my custom DM inserts for a pirate campaign using D&D 2024 rules (Skull and Shackles, Golarian setting (Pathfinder) conversion) and reasons why this vs. that. I use a DM screen with 4 inserts on the DM side (8"x11") and 4 on the outside for players. Every campaign I do gets its own...

D&D 3E, Pathfinder, and D&D 5E in some way tried to come up with the idea of earning notoriety in your campaign (called Fame/Infamy) and using it spend on benefits (called Prestige/Disrepute). I'm putting up some proposed rules for review as I haven't play tested them. They're based off a...

I went over the wisdom of some other DMs, reread my rules, and revised a 2024 House/Errata Ruleset from the previous post, updating rather than starting new posts. PDF, not edits, includes the April 16, 2025 errata release. CHARACTER CREATION [this largely stays the same, errata added for...

Next campaign is sea-faring, pirates, swinging from the yardarm, wenches and swains and all that good stuff. I'm looking at verisimilitude - spellcasters vs. ships. It feels...anticlimactic....if every battle is simply "wizard fireballs the sails" or something like that. I want to explain why...

Just like it sounds, our next campaign is going to be pirates and likely some variation of the Pathfinder Skulls and Shackles. I'm aiming to introduce Elizabethan-era firearms (usually used once in a skirmish), to make them attractive enough to spend the hundreds of gold upon but not...

I was recovering some old gaming material I used to have on defunct Google Sites and came across this. Not sure where it began: 1. Leap into water without removing anything, always. 2. Pretty good with meeting new guys and giving them an old dead teammate’s stuff. 3. Re-checking after being...

Last session, a character got pushed into lava. It wasn't really avoidable. The monsters were intelligent and it was in their nature, and I don't pull punches in my games, and he was standing next to the lava. He instantly died. I'm all about the "rule of cool," and one of the house rules we're...

Looking to craft a network of lost dwarven towns, forts and crossroads during a portion of our campaign wherein the party is tracking clues to follow someone through a vast network of a dwarven empire long ago overrun, connected once by a massive underground road system. If familiar with Dragon...

So short notice, as I procrastinated at the end of a year-long Dragonlance campaign (wherein we ran the original modules converted, with Level Up for characters), the players made it to the finale. And, while I have the "as written" part, it's not the climatic ultra-conflict boss battle that I...

...in our last Dragonlance (5E converted) session, the party brought a Dragon Orb into the heart of Sanction, epicenter for the Dark Queen's armies...and when things were looking really bad, almost used it, then chickened out (because they know the orbs are insanely crazy to control, having used...

toucanbuzz submitted a new resource: Quick & Memorable NPCs in 1 page - Rule of 3: visual, auditory, mannerism Read more about this resource...

Last session, the players spent some hard earned cash on a bag of holding. They advised, as a player group, that too many puzzles and obstacles in our last campaign were overcome by shoving people into the bag of holding (e.g. one person flies across a chasm). I advised that we were using some...

Thought I'd share from last session and see if anyone else has a story to share. Running a 5E conversion of Dragonlance, and at the bottom of Skullcap the 6th level party tangled with a CR10 wizardly apparition, immune to normal weapons. Skullcap was a ruined centuries-old base where the wizard...

toucanbuzz submitted a new resource: Dragonlance Wizard of High Sorcery Test - A test for a 4th level wizard and their entire party Read more about this resource...

We've started our Dragonlance campaign (pure coincidence with Morrus's timing!), and my gamers have been used to 5E rules. Our "barbarian" gamer hit level 2 and realized the 5E feature of "reckless attack" no longer exists, instead replaced with a 5% chance to have a hit do something special...

Last session ran into a scenario where dominate person conflicted with a suggestion. I wonder if I was going to rule it fairly. See below. BBEG cast dominate person on a PC who carried a weapon artifact that was a piece of the BBEG. If the BBEG could reunite with the weapon, it would become...

In 3 decades of DMing, I've had 3 campaigns in any edition go 2+ years, 15+ levels, AND completion. This, for good or ill, will be #4 (even if there's failure, the campaign will have its own unique ending). We started a Kingmaker (5E conversion of a Paizo adventure path where players build a...