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Blazing a New Trail When I started writing an all-inclusive guide to Faerun, Kara-Tur, and Zakhara, I included a lengthy section introducing the Forgotten Realms setting in general. That was before Wizards of the Coast announced it was releasing an official player’s guide which will do all that...

I'm considering changing spells like Spirit Guardians to be area spells instead of emanation spells. The spell's area is stationary by default, but you can move it up to 30 feet as a bonus action.

On the ENWorld news page, my browser cut off this headline in the middle, so it read, "Traveller Creator Marc Miller Passes..." When I read that, I thought Marc Miller had died. I'm glad that's not what the headline was actually saying when I clicked through and read it in full.

Supplemental update to the previous post: I've updated my posts in this thread to reflect the situation on the ground as of August 28th, 2024. (Namely, I don't want to call my book a player's guide, because Wizards of the Coast has claimed that name for one of their products.) The only thing I...

Great Minds Think Alike... ...and fools all think the same. Breaking news from Wizards of the Coast. They have just unveiled a previously unannounced product: the Forgotten Realms Player Guide, scheduled for release in late 2025. Needless to say, this throws a bit of a wrench in my plans, since...

Dagnammit. I guess I won't be using that title for an upcoming DMs Guild product after all.

This latest DDB misstep sounds like a bad decision made by the previous CEO working its way through the pipeline. And it it seems as though the new CEO dedicated resources to fixing it as soon as it was called to his attention. To me, that leaves some room for optimism.

Having read both of your posts, I'm pretty sure you and @Micah Sweet are in agreement on this topic. You're both explaining the same approach to the rules in slightly different words.

This post is another progress report. I had less free time than normal this weekend, so there’s less progress to report than in previous weeks. (As much as I’d like to work on this sourcebook I'm writing full time, I can only look at it when I get a spare hour here or there.) I had enough time...

Power creep is table-dependent. If the game increases the average power level without increasing the maximum possible power level, that's only power creep at a table where players aren't interested in optimization. At a table where all players optimize their characters, increasing just the...

Headline: RPG Publisher Torpedos Third-Party Content Creators Internet: Which publisher? I may or may not be mad about this!

Yep. I believe that's the Evereskan term for what's more generally described in the novels as "making the Elvish sign for" a word, or language to that effect. There's also the Trade Tongue of Kara-Tur, which is a pidgin made up of borrowed words and gestures. So that's another Realms language...

Random sign language trivia: There was a Dwarvish sign language in the 2e Complete Book of Dwarves, and a character in one of the Forgotten Realms novels uses (non-drow) Elvish sign language.

This speaks to one of the big complaints I have about the use of the Invisibility condition in the new rules. You have presented a consistent, common sense, workable way to apply the hiding rules and the Invisibility spell at the table. But even with all the benefits of common sense, the...

I think you've successfully identified what's causing friction in discussions about the hiding rules. I suspect some people who are pointing out the absurdity of the RAW are trying to make a similar point, albeit in a more circumspect manner. The new rules for hiding are trying to have their...

I'm convinced the Alien franchise takes place in a future where ubiquitous VR entertainment has desensitized the average human to any sort of danger or mystery. Everyone reacts to their environment as if it was a computer simulation with no long-term physical consequences. Giant alien corpse...

That's probably the excuse the movies uses, but it seems kind of silly to launch a survey drone and then not save the drone data to the computer you're lugging around alongside the survey drone. Those characters shouldn't need to rely on wifi to access a map file they created themselves. Then...

Did "Prometheus" ever explain how two characters got lost while wandering around underground... after their drone uploaded a 3d map of the entire tunnel system?

I don't know. Does Jaws count as a horror movie? That film can elicit a sense of heightened anxiety entirely unjustified by any factual information viewers know about sharks. Based on that, I'd say it's possible to make an effective horror movie about something that's scary like a tiger...

And Then There Are Mountains I’ve spent much of my free time this week adding details to the regional maps I'll be using in my book. Ideally, I’d add those details to a single, high-resolution globe of the world, which I would later break down into regional maps. Sadly, my ancient computer...