Recent content by Mark Hope

We've had characters own slaves twice in my games. In my last campaign set in Tyr, one player was playing a templar who owned slaves. It was interesting to see the in-character justifications the player came up with to make it even palatable. The consequences of this lasted all campaign long as...

The larger Dark Sun community has kind of just moved on without WotC. Athas.org are releasing one great product after another - and statting them for multiple editions. The Lands of the Ravaged Sun team have the first part of their campaign out. Jesse Heining just released a monster 300+ pages...

Does anyone use much of the stuff from the High Level DM Option book? I never gave it much thought but on a revisit found there was quite a bit that could add some colour and class features for post-name level play. Particularly interesting for players not interested in the domain game and...

4e - definitely bloodied. Such an easy concept to add to any other edition. And so much fun to implement. "It's doing what now?!"

Don Turnbull's notes on running the D modules closely mirror the prep I did for them a year or two back when running them under a houseruled 2e. He doesn't mention the roleplaying elements, but my notes don't contain a great deal of material on that too, even though I run a roleplay-heavy game...

Have you looked at Arcana Evolved from Monte Cook/Malhavoc? It is an interesting take on 3.5 that you may find a source of ideas. He did a 3.0 version as well called Arcana Unearthed.

Dark Sun is fuzzy on the cause: "In some lost millennium, as a bizarre experiment or perhaps as some sort of curse, giants were magically crossbred with humans." It doesn't really say much more than that on their origins :)

Half-giants are a player race in Dark Sun. They were magically bred originally but now are their own thing and have been around for a few thousand years in-game. They have some very specific characteristics in Dark Sun, though. If you and your players are into it, go for it. No reason to...

Night Below and Return to the Tomb of Horrors are both excellent - the former has incredible scope and the latter has some of the coolest locations I've seen in a while. Dragon's Crown for Dark Sun is also fantastic. You cross the entire of the Dark Sun map (as it was before they expanded it to...

Love doing this. My current arc is Return to the White Plume Tomb of Forlorn Darkness. It's Return to the Tomb of Horrors but using the area map of White Plume Mountain, with the PCs visiting some of the other locations on the map en route to the Tomb, including the mummy lair from Lords of...

It is/was the home campaign of Larry DiTillio - he detailed his approach to glyphs of warding and poisons in a couple of Dragon magazine articles. Great articles. I use his glyph stuff (Dragon #50) pretty much as-is and took inspiration from some of the poisons material (Dragon #59) as well. He...

Soooo many houserules... Ability score mods start at 13, like BX, but flatten out like AD&D Some new races Bonus spells for wizards No race/class limitations or level limits except sometimes Humans get +1 to any stat and 2 background powers from a big list Clerics prepare spells from a large...

Yep - exactly this. You put it more clearly than I did :D

At that level of play, you'll have a more enjoyable encounter by using a larger amount of enemies rather than one or two powerful foes. Your party will tear through anything up to about 15 HD in three or four rounds if they focus fire, particularly with a 16th level cleric on hand. Similarly, as...

From what I understand, the expanded content is largely the stuff on dungeons at the end - the first 100 pages were meant to be in the DMG but the rest of the DMG ran too long. That said, I don't see why it wasn't included anyway - it would have brought the DMG to about 290 pages, some 50 pages...