Recent content by Burnside

Sure - but terror is basically a more elevated/finer emotion than horror, and in storytelling terror > horror in terms of an artistic experience. In other words, if you CAN evoke terror, I can’t see why you’d choose to do horror instead. I think Stephen King said something like, “My goal is to...

Evoking terror in players has nothing to do with mechanics, and you’re also not going to terrify them simply by confronting them with overwhelming opposition - that is more likely to demoralize them than terrify them. Terror is created by turning the players’ imaginations against them. Delay...

An example of this in reverse: Waterdeep: Dragon Heist specifically warns you in the book that this might not be the best campaign for a barbarian, ranger, or druid as it's entirely urban and allegedly about investigation and intrigue. My players went with a barbarian and a druid and were...

I enjoy the specificity of material components for flavor. Whether or not a spell has verbal or somatic components doesn’t come up a lot, but in every campaign I’ve played that was a reasonably lengthy one, it absolutely mattered a handful of times.

Both options were available at my FLGS; I opted for the standard cover as I think the art on that one is more interesting and compelling than the special edition. Went the other way with the Theros book.

Yeah, I got that (although frankly, you might as well give them both; they don't conflict, and both serve the purpose of driving the party to move from town to town which you'll want them to do). I just mistakenly thought they were meant to complete one of them before doing the town quests.

I realize this can be changed as needed, but does anybody find the flow as written of the opening adventures and milestone leveling odd? It says one way to run it is to start with either Cold-Hearted Killer or Nature Spirits, run them, level up to 2, and then start doing the town quests. But the...

Interesting article about this: https://www.livescience.com/65221-years-winter-game-of-thrones.html

For some reason, posting "reviews" of adventures that you haven't actually fully read, much less played, is standard practice for a lot of RPG sites & Youtubers. It's really weird. With an adventure like this, ideally, yes, you'd play it before reviewing but realistically that takes like a year...

Well, normally it isn't Antarctica, but right now it is because of Auril's hijinks.

SO YOU ADMIT IT

Beating a dead horse, but they also do have sunlight. If all you have is four hours of twilight per day, you don't have any photosynthesis, so you don't have plants. If you don't have any plants, you don't have any animals. It's basically Cormac McCarthy's The Road, plus everything is frozen.

Yeah. The book also suggests that DWER-gar is an acceptable alternate pronunciation of duergar, but as all good people know, that is unacceptable. Characters in the first Icewind Dale game say "Auril" many, many times and I played that game many, many times and they pronounced it "AWE-rill. I...

Yeah, you're right; I work for a conservation NGO and write a lot about climate change, so that's probably why this stuff irked me more than it would most people.

I didn't say it's unplayable. In fact, I said it's easily fixable by just shortening the amount of time it's been going on. But if you think any civilization would still be this intact after two years on four daily hours of twilight and temps averaging 50 below - or that there would be any...