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EN Publishing's Monstrous Menagerie II has a monster called a Vaknid - a giant spider carapace whose interior is a void. It is able to weave web orbs and throw them across the battlefield. Where they land, a vacuous suction pulls in nearby creatures, and if you get pulled into the orb you can...

The name is a pun, but I'm not sure what to do with it. Ideas?

I want to have a dungeon crawl with a series of encounters against a singular dragon, where the party first spots evidence of its presence and its powers, then encounters it somewhere they have the option to flee because it's mostly invulnerable to their attacks initially, but then they find a...

Being as broad as possible, what's the best dungeon you've experienced - published or home-brewed? Was it the ambience? The peril? The game design? The storyline? For me, the best published dungeon I've played was book one of the Pathfinder Strange Aeons adventure path, where you wake up with...

My campaign is coming to an end in a few weeks, and one of the players has been itching for a while to have a good dungeon crawl, with maps and traps and puzzles and monsters. The campaign has had a fair bit of role-playing in the form of scheming and politicking, and the climax will probably...

I'm reading a book discussing how to go from understanding social injustices to actually enacting changes to achieve more social justice, and an idea sparked. An idea I'm pretty sure I can't actually do, but I'm momentarily enamored with it and want to share. Idea: A ZEITGEIST . . . I dunno...

TL;DR - how do I make "arranging a marriage" into an adventure for a D&D party? Love is ineffable, but political marriages don't need love. So what sub-goals should the party need to achieve to make the marriage work? --- In a Bronze Age Mesopotamia-esque setting where stone tablets have...

The party arrives in a riverside town in tonight's session. They're getting a ride from as river pirate who's also a popular bard, because criminals have street cred. Their long term goal is to ambush and heist a royal treasure barge coming this way in a few months. They're here to lay the...

I think of Pathfinder's Golarion, where the nation of Cheliax has plenty of demons running around. Or the Magic: the Gathering setting Ravnica, where sphinxes can hold, like, elected office as judges, and angels serve in the military. What are some settings that do interesting things with this...

Can I tap into your genius? Tonight my players will be rescuing a priestess (Nita) being held hostage by a rival religion. The setting is broadly bronze age Mesopotamia, with the main action being in a Babylon analog (No-Ostalin) along one river, complete with a big ziggurat where the high...

In my game, one of my friends is playing a Tabaxi (cat person). He's got a whole suite of Tabaxi NPCs in his backstory with names like something out of the Thundercats. (He's a swindler named Chee-tor. There's a drunken albino lion-man named Whiteclaw. A hairless Tabaxi named Sphynxo. Etc.) So...

To put it briefly, I've got a very free-form element of my campaign I need to figure out, where the party wants to pit various temples against each other. How do I fit that into a D&D game? Inspiration: Lately there has been a 'beef' between two musicians - Kendrick Lamar and Drake. I'll...

Can I ask you a random game design question? I am brainstorming a beat em up video game style fighting system. Think Double Dragon or Streets of Rage. As opposed to the normal RPG combat which has you declaring an action, rolling a die to see if you succeed, and then having the result, here...

TL;DR - in a bronze age city-state, sometimes poorly worded magic spells 'glitch' and shunt nearby people and objects into a demiplane of loosely linked motes of reality. What sorts of weird stuff could the party find in there. (This thread is loosely linked to an earlier one: D&D General -...

Update June 9: The heist happened. See page 2. My PCs will recruited to steal a magical clay tablet from the temple of a sea goddess, and I need ideas for what challenges stand in their way. In my setting, the sea goddess Beshel is depicted as a writhing tentacled thing, prayed to by fishermen...

My D&D group is doing session zero tonight to decide what kind of campaign we want to run, and each member of the group will make their proposal, and we will decide on what sounds most fun for the most of us. I want to make a pitch for a campaign where the player characters are criminals...

I'm guessing most of us don't roleplay with pre-modern phrases, but that's okay, because if you watch this video, you can take away that plenty of modern phrases were also used back in the day. They just were part of a suite of options, including many which are no longer popular. You could have...

I'm writing a bronze age fantasy novel, and in a bid to stay with the aesthetic of the era, I keep running into fun challenges of world-building. My latest: tea. Tea is a beverage made from steeping leaves of the tea plant in hot water. There are numerous other types of plant you can steep in...

I recently got bit by the nostalgia bug for Battletech. Big robots, no magic or psychic mumbo jumbo. Fun times. But thinking back on the novels I read in the 90s and the video games over the past couple decades, and comparing them to the understanding I have today about how war works, and my...

I work at a library, and a coworker and I had a conversation about me possibly running a 1 hour game for some staff who've never played RPGs before, as part of a series of staff members sharing their hobbies. I've run simple systems before, but how simple do you think I could go and still have...