Recent content by humble minion

Um, no? Temp hp from different sources don't stack so your hp total only benefits from whichever one of Inspiring Leader, Heroism, Aid, or the potion of Heroism gives you the most, and that's not going to help a lot. Aid only gives a tiny amount of temp hp by level 10 standards unless you...

Mounted combat (ranged or melee) in D&D is great right up until someone lobs a fireball at your 7th level party and all the 19hp horses die and then suddenly you're not a mounted party after all. Ask my 12th level paladin how often his steed lasts past the first round of combat some time. Hit...

Yes, Azure Bonds is excellent fun classic early Realms stuff. Gleefully high magic and eccentric, and I have a great deal of affection for it. The Brimstone Angels books get extremely good reviews (like 'some of the best FR books ever written' type reviews) but I can't attest to them...

Single most obvious thing? Give them blond hair and blue eyes. Or at least DON'T give them black hair and dark or coppery skin. Give them deep green foliage-coloured hair, give their skin spots or stripes like the pelts of big cats. Don't play into the old stereotypes, basically...

I think they will in the short term. There was a lot of player options that accumulated over the lifetime of 5e - WotC will want to make it as easy as possible for people playing a legacy subclass to switch over, and will not want prospective 5.5 adopters to look at the pallete of available...

I never liked Nimble Escape. It just meant that the most iconic class for a goblin - the rogue - was a massively suboptimal choice because you already got a bunch of the rogue abilities for free from your race, and there was no compensation for doubling up. I do like the increased speed, but...

I wouldn’t be reading too much into that quite yet. Legends and Lattes (which I read yesterday) itself started on a very similar note. The scene of ‘adventure-typical’ violence. It serves as a contrast to what comes later, to emphasise why the MC might see the cosy life as desirable.

I might be romanticising the past here, but I think the internet right now is probably at its worst. From the earliest days it was very bad for some small number of people, but the whole low-grade continual awfulness it grinds out that affects absolutely everyone is imho much more a product of...

Thanks, I thought i remembered something vaguely like that. But yeah, an adjustment like this is necessary for Dark Sun's exploration/survival pillar to be meaningful at all, and that just can't happen if we're using PHB rules as written. But I don't think that WotC has EVER, in the lifetime...

I'm fuzzy on Create Water, but I'm 99.9% sure that Goodberry at least DID exist in 2e. The kicker was that you had to provide fresh berries as a material component that the spell consumed, which limited its usefulness in Athas. I think it was 2nd level too. Besides, the big deal was that in...

I think races and classes are probably the easy bit. You can do a 'soft' exclude like Dragonlance did, just have a sidebar talking about how X, Y, Z races are the most appropriate and talk to your DM if you absolutely desperately want to play something else. There's fundamental elements of 5e...

There's a fair bit more that defines the 'cosy' fantasy genre than simply the explicitness of the sex scenes. Cosy fantasy doesn't even need to HAVE romance in it or as a major element, really. The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (which won a Hugo) might be an example there. Violence and...

I'm playing a halfling warlock currently, possibly my first ever halfling. The high Cha warlock synergy is a good opportunity to play a mostly-true-to-type halfling - curious, sociable, a little bit innocent, interested in other people and so on. I've wanted to play a dwarf in 5e for a long...

I’m not exactly a guru on the genre, but 'romantasy' is a category that covers a LOT of ground these days. The steamy shadow-daddy BookTok faves like Fourth Wing and ACOTAR probably get the most hype (and according to a friend of mine who is a very successful writer in a not-unrelated field...

Polk is a genuinely good writer and is seriously worth the read. And while I haven’t read Fourth Wing , the blurb on this one says ‘cosy’ rather than ‘spicy’ which is genre-speak for ‘very non-explicit’. So not sure the BookTok ACOTAR etc fans are entirely the demographic they’re after. Though...