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Personally I count realism as an important part of any dungeon design, it's not the #1 priority but it does matter. And it's worth noting that by thinking of and putting in the details like where/what the inhabitants eat/drink you do open up opportunities for players to get creative and do...

Level progression can be different between settings if you don't use XP levelling. And the rarity of high CR monsters will vary between settings. A low magic setting without any class restrictions for players might for example use a slow level progression framework to keep player magic levels...

You should probably differentiate post-apocalyptic into the Mad Max/Fallout style PA vs stuff like Shannara Chronicles, Planet of the Apes style of PA.

Kind of feels like many of the fluffs are just moved to different classes, so it's Cleric who tends to nature spirits instead of Druids, Druids make pacts instead of Warlocks, etc... That said, I think in terms of worldbuilding you could have an Inheritor type fluff where the magic comes from...

But this also should change throughout the world, ie one society might be monotheistic, another might be polytheistic, etc... In my worldbuilding I don't like having there to be an actual factual history of how the world was created, different people/societies will believe different things...

Isn't this why the books say don't take the rules too literally and try to parse the language so that it goes against the natural language/common sense reading. Like sure it's somewhat lazy to not correct this type of thing as part of an edition update after similar language has been pointed...

I mean I get it, but that's something a DM might want to work on. Adding those "insignificant" details is what helps brings locations alive and can provide some historical footnotes/lore which may or may not be relevant down the line but make things seem more real. It's one of the suggested...

Sure but that's probably only a real issue if the only time the DM ever describes statues they are something. How many times will players investigate a normal statue and come up with nothing before they give up investigating every statue they come across? Also worth noting if they think they...

Scrolls of True Strike allow you to farm off turn sneak attacks.

I haven't made a build for it yet but Fey Wanderer with Dragon Cult seems to have some potential. There's also a few species that can grant Frighten as well, to open up even more sources.

In my games Ankhegs always came in a pack rather then being a solo monster. Something like a Bulette was the solo burrowing monster, Ankhegs were the wolf pack monsters using hit & run tactics. The two main tactics were pop up outside of melee range of everyone, spit acid, and re-burrow, so the...

I'm of the opinion that a lot of problems could be solved if the spell DC was based at least partly on on the level of the spell slot used. You'd still have to adjust the CC spells where upcasting gets to target an additional creature, but generally speaking a low level CC spell should have...

Arcane Trickster is probably the obvious choice, with you being part of a rival wizard group that got slaughtered by this group and so now you are learning magic the "hard" way. But I would be tempted with Phantom Rogue, when this mage group killed your family and damaged your leg they used some...

I had a Dryad that was kidnapping villagers and sacrificing them at the base of her tree to feed it blood. I modified the tree stride to allow taking one willing person with her which made her quite adept with the charm at separating a PC from the rest of the party. And a PC alone and charmed...

The scenery type stuff should mostly be in addition to the interesting encounters and not be the encounter itself. And often times you don't want that stuff to be random. If you are using say the weather to help set a specific tone then you can't use/rely on a random table to do that.

One problem with this type of "random" approach is that without the adventuring context a lot of this stuff is just not particularly interesting in itself. If the players are trying to sneak into an orc camp to rescue some prisoners, then something like a posturing bear becomes more interesting...

My belief is that to make anything interesting there needs to be an interesting choice being made by the players. So the answer to how to make travel interesting is simple, provide interesting choices for the players. Random combat encounters don't tend to provide interesting choices, but that...

Keep in mind the ratio of actions stays the same regardless of how many players there are because it's based on the hope/fear dice and not the number of players all getting a turn. The increased difficulty from a larger group comes from the larger total HP/Stress/Hope pools that the adversaries...

There's the fluidity element that should help either speed up the combat, or at least remove the sort of dead space of a player spending a couple minutes trying to decide what to do which is pretty common for CR. But additionally the spotlight swinging back to the DM often through either failed...

I figure it's more likely a reference to returning guest appearance but it's all just guesswork right now.