Search results

Have a dictionary at hand when perusing this book. Jilly Jump-at-the-moon has a gurning grin. Gurning is a distorted facial expression that involves projecting the lower jaw as far forward and up as possible and covering the upper lip with the lower lip.1 It is a deliberate process of pulling a...

The rest of the campaign book dropped today, along with an updated monster book. The hexes are all there, now, and a neat feature of the pdf is that you can tap on the small map insert to see what is in the adjacent hexes, and it jumps straight to them. I thought it said that the “redcap”...

I finished reading through the module (again) a little earlier, and saw something that adds weight to my idea that the spell “Detect Evil” can reveal that an object is cursed. On page 22, under “55. Chapel of Evil Chaos”, it speaks of bronze vessels will glow if “Detect Evil” is cast upon them...

Nentir Vale is an excellent setting for a hex-crawl, and the core DMG leans into that, with suggestions on various places that the DM can put a dungeon. The place’s backstory is ready-made for a D&D game: a land that was once inhabited by a great empire, but was abandoned because of war. Now...

The DMG talks about DM styles (“gritty” versus “cinematic”, etc.) on page 12. Page 13 lists the pros and cons of episodic campaigns versus ongoing story. Pages 136 and 137 list several fantasy subgenres, such as “horror”, “swords and sorcery”, and “wuxia”, along with a short description of how...

The monster manual was made available a few days ago. I am really liking the Dolmenwood take on dragons. I seriously want to create a dungeon, maybe four or five levels deep, that has a black bile wyrm at the end. The final room has the wyrm slithering from the chamber, only the burst back in...

I knew that book was suspicious

Re: the commercial The product being advertised is the Moldvay Basic Game (a copy of “Keep on the Borderlands” is also lying (laying?) on the table, at the end), so the highest levels that the PCs can be is 3, and yet the magic user has access to lightning bolt, which isn’t even described in...

It had a kick-tail commercial, with superb animation.

B/X is quick to prep (relatively) and quick to start playing. As someone else mentioned, it has actual guidelines for creating dungeons—including a step-by-step example of a DM creating “The Haunted Keep”. There are examples of play that demonstrate how to play, while at the same time showing...

Scanning through the book last night, I found that high-level Dolmenwood “thieves” do not have the ability to cast spells from scrolls. In addition to changing the class name (probably to “Delver” or “Dungeoneer” or simply, “Adventurer”), I plan to houserule this ability back into the class...

For reference, re: the Medieval peasant’s diet https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2019/may/medieval-peasant-diet.html From the article: “The findings demonstrated that stews (or pottages) of meat (beef and mutton) and vegetables such as cabbage and leek, were the mainstay of the medieval peasant...

At one point, it mentions that water is easy to find in Dolmenwood, because of a plethora of streams, springs, a pools. Is that generally true of forests?

I made the mistake of reading through the descriptions of “poor food” while eating spaghetti. There are options for playing “kindred-as-class” in the appendix. Breggles get arcane magic at higher levels. I dislike that the publishers continued the misguided tradition of calling a particular...

I don’t hate any edition of D&D. There are editions I prefer, but I am happy for other people who like the editions that I don’t. I like 4e, a lot. It’s the only edition on which I have spent a (relatively) substantial amount of money. Some have speculated that, had WoTC called it something...

Good point!

This is a tangentially related thought, but I think the cover art of at least one of the rules books should depict what the game is about—and hat tip to Matt Colville for giving me this idea. The 0D&D cover art, for example, was a guy on a horse, so that explains the subsequent covers depicting...

The Essentials player handbooks don’t have as much art as the core PHB. My favorite William O’Connor piece is in the Rules Compendium, in front of Chapter One. It depicts a party looking at a tower. It looks like a storm is just about to start, or it just ended. There is a bright light shining...

One of my very favorite 4e-era art pieces is the “Hurley-Burley Brothers” by Vincent Proce, in the “Monster Vault 2”. A pair of trolls arguing over a dead deer. They look very angry. There is another nice piece, of a cleric of Erathis marching through a bog, torch in one hand and mace in the...

The Bard of Bardic Broadcasts (the “Why Heroquest is so great” guy), finally published—a year later—part two of his review of the Larry Elmore art book. He reveals the painting that he said in the first video was the best Elmore did (in the Bard’s opinion). At one point, he starts going...