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Monstrous Creatures Most monsters in the D&D game can be found under the Nighted Sun, although relatively few of them are native to that setting. Various magical effects—including efforts to repopulate the dying world—have brought a wide variety of monsters from different times and places into...

Thanks for the kind words. At the moment, I'm finishing up a Forgotten Realms project, but I'll make time to drop some more notes in this Dark Sun thread for anyone who's interested in reading a few more of my thoughts.

Thanks for your feedback. I've seen another Dark Sun thread on this forum dedicated to hopeful themes. I don't want to detract from the work posters are doing in that other thread by creating redundant material, so I'll to stick to Lovecraftian themes in this thread.

I'll have to give William Hope Hodgson a look. I'm not familiar with The Night Land.

A random idea inspired by the Dark Sun campaign setting and by the works of H.P. Lovecraft: The Nighted Sun “[Darkness almost material] burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky...” - H.P. Lovecraft, The...

Great observations! To expand on this, if you're using Monsters of the Multiverse, you can compensate for losing Martial Arts by using one of the species whose traits boost unarmed strike damage (Centaur, Lizardfolk, Minotaur, Satyr, or Tabaxi). Of those species, Lizardfolk has the drawback of...

We should create a bracket and have people vote on it

I once ran a year-long 3e campaign without rolling a single die. All rolls were opposed, with monsters and NPCs taking 10 and dealing average damage. Whenever an NPC v. NPC conflict needed to be resolved by dice, I'd let the players temporarily run the NPCs on one side of the conflict. Aside...

Take out the cameras, and that pretty much describes every employer I've ever had

My apologies. I didn't see the D&D 5E tag on this thread, so I was mistakenly assuming a broader discussion of in-setting character advancement in different game systems was on the table. I'll save that for a general thread.

If you want learnable abilities to make sense in setting, you probably shouldn't be playing a D&D-style, class-and-level-based system. Outside of a few contrived narratives, the type of character advancement present in D&D and related games makes very little sense in any setting.

Because the PCs have chosen the path that let's them master 20 levels of class features over the course of a hundred or so encounters? Meanwhile, the NPCs of the setting have each devoted years of training to mastering one or two tricks that can't be learned by simply experiencing a few...

Humanoids vs. Monsters Slowly but surely, I'm editing the 600+ pages of my Forgotten Realms travel guide. I'm gradually conducting line edits, filling in gaps in the text, and tracking down an occasional illustration to add. At the same time, I'm also digesting the content of the 2025 Monster...

It might also be worth asking this on cartographersguild.com

Sure. And I would have liked the rules a lot better if they had consistently said that. Instead, we have a game that relies on exception-based design presenting the reader with extremely precise, key-word-laced rules for hiding that one could arguably interpret as an exception to the default...

Someone should have told this to the designer who wrote the rules for hiding, because the line, "When you try to hide, you use the Hide action," completely misrepresents the core game loop. Your description of how hiding works is clearer and more insightful and than anything present in the core...

For what it's worth, my house rules use passive Stealth, passive Perception, and environmental considerations to determine encounter distance. So you're not alone in using passive Stealth.

"-core" is the new "-punk" And now that I've typed that, I think I want a cottagepunk RPG

I agree with your statement in general. The challenge posed by poorly worded Stealth rules, in particular, (as @James Gasik pointed out in post 531) is that the RAI could realistically be one of two things: stealth is an easy-to-use, ninja-like Elder Scrolls "stealth mode" tactic; or stealth is...

I was curious to hear if anyone could find a general rule above and beyond "roll a binary skill check." If you want a specific scenario, I suppose we could say my PC is walking behind an opaque curtain, and every other creature in the room is on the other side of the curtain. If "make a binary...