Author Archives: Brent
Running a D&D Game with 1 Player
Sometimes, you only have one player available to play. Sometimes, one player in your campaign wants to split off and pursue his or her own goals for a while. Can you run a D&D game for one player? Sure. Do you have to do it differently? Yes. However, here’s the good news: it’s 95% the same as … Continue reading
Monster Monday: The Tricaput
In a more sane world, the Tricaput would be one of those calm herbivores that mostly gets out of humans’ way. Instead, the Tricaput — all six tons of it — chooses a mile-wide area of land as its territory and defends it viciously against anything larger than a dog, flying into rages at the … Continue reading
Faction Friday: Elesantra’s Dungeon of Wonder and Goblins
Elesantra, an adventurous elf, followed the classic adventurer career: She spent years delving into dungeons, collecting various items of power, then eventually retired very comfortably. Having developed a taste for city life, she put her money in charge of a local banker, bought a small mansion, and placed her collection of magic items in a … Continue reading
Monster Monday: Skullspiders
Spawned in abandoned graveyards and poorly maintained battlefields, skullspiders are large, venomous predators about the size of a cat. Unlike the single web of a typical spider, each skullspider will spread several thick webs over graves, crypts, bushes, and trees and feed indiscriminately on anything that gets caught there. They are also viciously territorial and … Continue reading
Faction Friday: Gus’s Goblins
Life’s tough for goblins who try to be good. Many of them turn to the merchant life as peddlers and gypsies, turning their natural eye for trinkets into a shrewd judge of value. Still, they take quite a while to earn the locals’ trust. Enter Gus, a minor half-elf spell-caster who never seemed to find … Continue reading
The Inverse Barker Mechanic: d100 for Everything
I’ve probably written about this on Google+ a few times, but I wanted to document it in full. Apparently, M.A.R. Barker, creator of the early RPG Empire of the Petal Throne, after decades of role-playing settled on a very simple system: The GM takes the PCs’ character description into account when describing NPC reactions, so if … Continue reading
Monster Monday: Painsoppers
Today’s monster is converted from the “hexmute” found in GURPS: Creatures of the Night by Scott Paul Maykrantz. Painsoppers are strange humanoids who live on pain. Usually encountered in groups of 3 to 10, they are indistinguishable from normal humans except for their irises, which are pure black, and the fact that they never speak. They … Continue reading
Faction Friday: The Gatekeepers
Every city attracts a wide variety of religious believers, from the established to the fringe. The Gatekeepers are a canonical example of the latter. Using only heavy white caps as symbols of their fraternity, the Gatekeepers gather at various spots around the city which they’ve identified as “universal nexus points,” or “gates.” According to their … Continue reading
You cannot build a perfectly challenging puzzle for D&D
In most traditional RPG campaigns, PCs face broadly three kinds of challenges: physical combat, social conflict, and intellectual puzzles. The rules of the game usually cover physical combat in plenty of depth, and most groups can navigate difficult conversations without complex rule systems. Puzzles, meanwhile, beguile us. We imagine an ingeniously interconnected set of traps … Continue reading
Monster Monday: Whip Vines
Whip vines drink blood. They look simply like long, very thorny green vines, but they conceal a round sac, buried deep in the ground or kept high in the air, that acts as a simple “brain” for the organism. Whip vines sense movement with great accuracy. Any movement nearby causes the whip vines to animate, … Continue reading