Ben Stovall Blog

Author: Ben Stovall

RPGs: Dungeon Traps as Encounters

During my table’s test run of Pathfinder, I came across a new way of thinking of traps in RPGs that I feel like a fool for not having considered sooner. In Pathfinder, traps have legitimate statblocks, like a goblin or bear or other monster your party would encounter in battle. A “complex hazard” will usually have a reaction to some way the players can interact with the environment nearby, and then they will roll initiative. The players can then attempt to hack away at the mechanism until it breaks, or find the device and disable it before it continues to affect them. A series of traps can become a full blown encounter this way, and I’d never thought to use them as such!

So, while we’re still playing D&D to finish out my current campaign, I decided to give this idea a go. My party is currently exploring an ancient wizard’s laboratory, and the first room of this delve I devoted entirely to a “trap encounter.” I found this map, the Mad Lich’s Crypt, on talestavern and stocked it for my purposes, so thank you to user JustcallmeWendy!

Now, onto the encounter.

The Room

So, the party began their exploration into this ancient and buried laboratory. A warning in an ancient dialect on the statues near the door gave them little pause, and the entered the first room. There, our fighter noticed a little barred grate near the floor that allowed them to see the blue brazier beyond. Just as he mentioned it, however, the party moved into the room itself, a hidden gate slammed down between them and the entrance, and I asked them to roll initiative.

These red, glowering grates in the floor I made the origin for a 3rd-level Fireball. A rune would explode twice a round, once at its initiative rolled, then again ten steps down in the order, always exploding where it would hit the most people. This encounter also involved a bit of a puzzle, with these levers needing to be thrown within the same round to lift a wall to allow them to even get near the blue brazier that kept the traps active. Because of the order of events, our cleric player cast a True Seeing spell before the first fireball exploded (worried an invisible enemy may be in the room), and noticed that the floor before the lever closest to them was merely an illusion, just in time to warn the fighter not to cross it!

Once a lever was flipped, it lit a torch beside the wall that would rise. However, after 1 round, the lever would reset unless held down by someone. Holding a lever down also caused a burst of cold damage (4d8) to whoever decided to do so, and thus the party was split, three members in the tunnel, and two left by the levers.

Also, while the wall was raised, a lightning ballista became active, firing a 10-foot-wide 3rd-level Lightning Bolt down this corridor. But, the party managed to access the blue brazier and extinguish its flame, turning all the traps off before anyone get too damaged (they are 19th level, after all). With the fire extinguished, they found the gate to the entryway reset, the wall raised, and the gate blocking their path forward opened.

I enjoyed this style of dungeon trap immensely more than the basic binary “I check for traps” rolls would usually fall into. I don’t enjoy overly punitive design, and hitting my players with a load of damage for failing to essentially bookkeep their progress through a dungeon never sat right with me. I still have a few things I want to improve on for this style of trap encounter more – a handful of which are explicitly in Pathfinder’s rules. I have further instances of traps being involved with and being full encounters in this dungeon, so I’m excited to keep honing the system further.

That’s it for this post. Thanks for reading! Good luck out there, heroes.

February 28, 2023
Harry Potter and the Author Who Damaged Its Legacy

I have this vivid memory from when I was a child. I don’t remember where we were or why we were there, but my brother and I were in a hotel room with my mom and an ad for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone came on the TV. My brother and I were enraptured, and for weeks we quoted the “… or worse, expelled.” exchange. It’s the first time I remember hearing about the franchise.

I couldn’t tell you how many days or weeks there were between then and when my mom took us to see the movie, but we loved it. And I was just a kid, not keeping up with movie releases or anything at the time, so when we went next year to see a sequel I was blown away even further.

I went with my mom to nearly every Harry Potter release in theaters. I got the books as they were released (though I only ended up reading Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows before seeing their movies). I think the ending of Goblet of Fire just made me need to know what was going to happen next – more than the earlier movies had, anyway.

Between the Wizarding World and Lord of the Rings, I was certainly not starved for fantasy stories growing up. Then, we got an Xbox 360 in 2006 with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, eventually got Dragon Age: Origins, and I’d begun playing Runescape and World of Warcraft and my fate was sealed. This was my bag, sword fights and wizards and dragons: that shit was my jam.

Harry Potter was incredibly important to me growing up. I’d watch and rewatch these movies with my mom or on my own. So much so, that when Rowling first starting getting a bit of pushback for “adding context” to her books via twitter, I didn’t see what the fuss was. I mean, it was stupid to insist that the wizards were just shitting themselves, but I guess I didn’t really consider it true, you know? I supposed I’d already gotten into the “Death of the Author” camp, and didn’t care for her “intent” beyond the written words.

The problem, then, is that weird tweets isn’t at all where it stopped.

J.K. Rowling isn’t just desperately grasping onto her work as a means to remain relevant long after its release, she’s using the platform her success catapulted her into to advocate against human rights. Rowling is a card-carrying Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, using all the money and fame she’s accumulated to make life harder for an incredibly small and marginalized population of people just trying to live their lives. People that might’ve found solace in her work in their youth.

And, for me, that was enough for me to decide that insofar as my money goes, it wouldn’t be going toward Rowling. I disengaged with her other work and the fandom. And I was able to set it down. I can accept that these books were influential and formative for my youth, but I also choose to leave them there.

I also recognize that others don’t have any imperative to do the same. I don’t presume that the standards I hold myself to should apply to everyone else. I would, perhaps, merely advocate for others to endeavor to be aware of where their money is going and consider that when making nonessential purchases, but I know, for the most part, people who bought this game or still enjoy these movies are just trying to relax after working to live their own lives. And for that, I wouldn’t condemn them. The energy and time expended by many on attacking others for not joining them in their boycott could be better used elsewhere.

There’s been a lot of instances lately, it seems, where people use social media to attack their allies for failing to be perfect allies. That left-wing spaces have a tendency to eat their own, and the fact of the matter is that they kind of do. Because our true opponents do not care about our disappointment in them, many of them revel in it. There are people who respond to learning about Hogwarts: Legacy’s transphobic originator and antisemitic narrative and choose to reply “Well now I am buying two copies.” We are unable to shame these people into reasonable action, so we instead attack those who do worry that they may do harm with their actions. And that is not activism – more often than not, it is little more than cruelty. Do good in your communities, help real people, donate, discuss these issues and educate those we can – whatever you can manage.

But I’m also a cis white man, so what the hell does my opinion count for anyway?

As always, thank you for reading. Good luck out there, everyone. Remember that you are loved.

February 18, 2023
The Open Gaming License

I’d been planning on letting D&D as a topic cool off for the month of January after my “D&D December,” but some things shouldn’t go unaddressed. Originally published during the game’s 3rd edition in 2000, the Open Game License (OGL) allowed third-party publishers to create compatible game material for Dungeons and Dragons. This was an out-and-out win for both the community and Wizards of the Coast. Player-facing books will always be the better selling product, but if there is no support for the game master, games will be harder to run, harder to find. While that investment-to-profit ratio on GM-facing products might be unappealing to a large corporation, a smaller creator might squeeze into that slim margin for a passion project and come out ahead.

The document, by its own language, is “irrevocable.” From Wizards in 2004, “… if Wizards made a change you disagreed with, you could continue to use an earlier, acceptable version at your option. In other words, there’s no reason for Wizards to ever make a change that the community of people using the Open Gaming License would object to, because the community would just ignore the change anyway.”

Late last year, rumors began circling about Wizards / Hasbro wanting to make changes to the OGL. On January 5th, Linda Codega received a draft of the new document and reported on the changes therein. The OGL 1.1 wanted to deauthorize the original version, included new clauses about ownership and royalty fees to be paid to WOTC, and a requirement for all would-be creators to register with WOTC. This was saddled with an effective date of January 13th, giving creators a mere handful of days to comply.

And the community was set ablaze.

Aftermath

In the wake of all this news, the tabletop community acted fast. Videos from CritCrab, DnD Shorts, LegalEagle and even larger creators were being dropped on the daily. DnD Shorts was sent an email from an employee within WOTC revealing that the executive sentiment saw the players of D&D as “an obstacle to their money.” Subscriptions on dndbeyond were the metric they were observing to see the financial impact of the news. Hundreds, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of subscriptions were cancelled (mine included). And, finally, WOTC made a response.

The OGL 1.1 was going to be “delayed.” WOTC assured us that they’d always intended to gather feedback from the community before going forward with any changes. They wanted us to know that the community won – but so did WOTC. And in internal dialogue, WOTC’s management believes that the fans are “overreacting” to the leaked draft, and that in a few months, nobody will remember the uproar.

Here’s a few things: if WOTC always intended to gather community feedback, why did the draft have an effective date within a few days of it being sent out? Why did WOTC contact Kickstarter regarding crowdfunded projects?

Before Wizards made their response, the third-party publishers were first to speak. Kobold Press announced project Black Flag to release a new, subscription free ruleset – a new splinter like Paizo before them. And Paizo announced their plans to have a system neutral Open RPG Creative License (ORC) drafted and handled by Azora Law to provide safe harbor against any company involved being bought, sold, or changing management.

It’s really hard to see exactly why Wizards thinks they won anything here.

What It Means for Me

There’s a lot spinning out of this for me. Foremost, I’m planning on switching to a new system for my next campaign. Realistically, I could continue playing 5th edition for the rest of my life without giving WOTC another cent, but I’d rather continue to contribute to the hobby’s growth by learning other systems. I’ve had the urge on-and-off to write a module of the campaign opening I used for my last two games, and ultimately it doesn’t look like that would be something I want to do with D&D’s system anymore. This week, my players and I are taking out first stab at Pathfinder’s 2nd edition during a break in our normal campaign.

Additionally, my blog category is now going to be generalized to “TTRPGs.” Some old posts have had their titles adjusted – ones where I believe the topic is applicable to TTRPGs as a whole and not just D&D. Many of those posts were about system specifics or fandom divides, however, and those will retain their titles.

Lastly, it’s likely I will stop covering the changes for OneD&D on my blog. Unless WOTC completely reneges on their attempts to change the OGL and signs on to Paizo’s ORC, I see little reason to contine to do so. TTRPGs are bigger than D&D, and even D&D is bigger than WOTC and Hasbro. To this day, people still play older, unsupported editions of the game with no need to advance to the newest thing.

When you remember that, it’s laughable that Wizards ever thought that these changes would slide.

As always, thank you for reading. Good luck out there, heroes.

January 16, 2023
Returning to Warcraft

In July of 2021, news broke about a lawsuit against Blizzard Entertainment. The suit alleged that, as a company, Blizzard had systemically mistreated their female employees. There was a “frat boy culture” complete with “cube crawls” in which workers would drink at one another’s cubicles during the workday and grope their female coworkers. Employees who reported these behaviors faced retaliation. A female employee committed suicide during a business trip with a male supervisor who had brought sex toys with him on the trip. Their courtesy rooms for recently pregnant employees who needed to pump were poorly furnished and lacked security with someone reporting their breast milk stolen from the fridge. In the midst of all this news, two people were promoted to fill J. Allen Brack’s position once he left the company, Mike Ybarra and Jen O’neal, and they did not pay Jen as much as they paid Ybarra despite both of them advocating for it.

I ended an eleven-year concurrent subscription to World of Warcraft the same day that this news broke. I was horrified and disgusted that this company that had been a part of my life for so long was like this. Unfortunately, it was more akin to the last straw than a strictly moral stance. Shadowlands was the least fun I’d ever had playing Warcraft, but I was more-or-less in charge of the guild I’d been playing with for over a decade, so I felt some sort of duty to stick around.

When this news broke, I told the guild that when my time expired, I was done. I didn’t think I’d ever be coming back. My game time lasted until November, and on the last possible night we managed to finish the raid on heroic after several weeks of attempts on the final boss. I did not open Battle.net for an entire year after that moment.

I kept up with some news. I watched the Dragonflight announcement and felt underwhelmed. I didn’t really think Blizzard would change – not in philosophy, and not in culture.

But, maybe they did.

New Direction

I’ve been a fan of Preach Gaming for a long time. I think I first found his channel in 2012 during Mists of Pandaria, but I probably became a subscriber and fan in the time of Legion (2016). Like much of the player base, Preach had been heartbroken with the news and resolved to risk his entire livelihood and stop his daily coverage of Warcraft as his primary work for his videos. Like many of us, he had been passionate about this game for a long time despite it feeling worse and worse over time.

Late last year, Preach spent his own money to take a trip to California and visit the Blizzard campus, interviewing the developers to talk about the new direction of the game and the fallout of the lawsuit. And, honestly, it began to look like the lawsuit had helped remove the problematic people who had been with Blizzard all those years. Things looked like they’d gotten better.

The game was headed to a healthier place: one designed for the player’s enjoyment and not just their retention. Gone were the nonoptional activities that advanced your character’s power outside of the endgame pillars. Gone were the restrictive systems and grinds that made players feel the need to engage with content they’d long since grown tired of to continue gaining artifact and anima power. Playing multiple characters became something encouraged by the game, instead of a burden as players saw a laundry list of dozens of things they’d need to complete again to get their characters ready for the fun stuff they wanted to do.

Even hearing this from friends, I was skeptical. Many of them hadn’t quit in Shadowlands, maybe it was just survivorship bias. Ultimately, I knew I couldn’t take anyone’s word but my own, so I decided to drop some of the gold I’d had in game for a token and give it a shot.

It’s been about a month since then. I’ve leveled four of my characters to 70, when I only ever got one to 60 in Shadowlands. I’ve just achieved Keystone Master with my friends, despite us now needing to find people to fill our groups instead of having an active guild to run with. I’ve been making gold with my professions, in the hopes of continuing to pay for the game with that virtual currency. I haven’t been into the raid yet, but I’ve been completely satisfied with the dungeon endgame.

That game is just fun again.

But I’m not ready to give Blizzard a full pass.

There’s Still Room to Improve

Ultimately, the monetization of Blizzard’s games is still disgusting. Diablo: Immortal is not even a year old. Diablo 4 is set to release this year with a battle pass system for cosmetics and so far, they’ve been quiet on what, if anything, they’re doing with this system to address FOMO. And, at any point, they could fall into their old ways and start designing poor systems that restrict the players again.

But, unlike before, I’m not going to stick around if the game stops being fun. There’s really not much else to it.

As always, thank you for reading. Now let’s drop that ready check and get this run going.

January 12, 2023
2022: Year in Review

As we come upon the end of 2022, I wanted to take a moment to look back at all of the media I’ve enjoyed this year and talk about what I loved. Consider this a graduation of a “Ben Recommends” post, one plus-sized entry to talk about several games, books, movies, and TV shows that I didn’t devote an entire post to earlier in the year. Not all of these projects were released this year, but they were things I experienced for the first time in 2022. As always, we’ll avoid spoilers as much as we can, so without further delay, let’s dive in.

Books

I didn’t read as much as I’d planned to this year, but there was certainly no shortage of quality books that completely ensnared me. The craft on display inspired me to keep honing my own writing, to pursue the best I can manage and always improve.

A Memory Called Empire & A Desolation Called Peace

Arkady Martine’s Hugo winning duology was instantly one of the best books I’d ever read. I remember a moment – the first “on-screen” interaction between Ambassador Mahit and her predecessor Yskandr – that I just felt floored. Every time I pick up a Hugo winner, I find something, an idea or an impeccable presentation, some way to present a thought in a way that I hadn’t been able to consider or articulate myself, that just reminds me why I was so drawn to writing in the first place. I read Desolation before 2022’s Hugos were awarded, but I had no doubt it my mind it would snag the win.

The Rage of Dragons

I first picked up Evan Winter’s novel to read while I was unable to engage in my more persistent distractions, but I found it so gripping that even when I’d finally returned home, it was still consuming my time. Reading it reminded me of the way Game of Thrones made me feel when the show had been at its best, even despite how different the two tales are. The book is so deliberate, so consistent, that even moments that might drag in a lesser novel remained just as enthralling here. I can’t wait to catch up with the Fires of Vengeance and join everyone else in waiting for the next novel.

Elder Race

Adrian Tchaikovsky is an author whose name I’d see pop up on the fantasy subreddit time and again, so I decided to give Elder Race a try to dip my toes into his work. I finished the entire novella in a day, moving only when my spot on the couch started to become uncomfortable. Only once I’d finished did I set the book down, adding more of his work to my wish list for the holidays.

Movies

I only found my way into a theater a handful of times this year, catching The Batman and the new Marvel movies, and when I did sit down with a movie at home it was often one I’d already seen. Still, there was a notable exception that deserves a spot of recognition here.

Knives Out & Glass Onion

Say what you will for Rian Johnson’s entry into Star Wars, but the man knows how to craft an exciting mystery. I finally got around to seeing Knives Out this year, and I immediately knew I had to share the movie with my mother. It’s a wonderful film with surprising twists and turns all throughout, and Glass Onion certainly serves as a great sequel to expand the canon on Benoit Blanc.

TV Shows

There were a lot of new shows this year that I didn’t ever get around to watching. I’ve heard great things about dozens of shows, but never had the opportunity to check most of them out. Of what I did see, the two below really stick out as the best of the best.

Better Call Saul

I was a huge fan of Better Call Saul since the first season. Each time they finally got added to Netflix, I slammed through each episode, hungry for more. Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan worked a miracle, following up one of the best television dramas ever with a spinoff sequel, that, for me, surpassed the original. It’s a master class in pacing, in setup and payoff, in following through, even if it might become predictable. The final season stuck the landing, and I can’t wait to see what these guys do next.

Andor

If it hadn’t finished so close to the year, I think Andor would’ve had its own entire post. This show was something I’d always wanted from Star Wars: a gritty, grounded story about people rising against the tyranny of the empire. It isn’t afraid to take its time, to build clear stakes and show us who these characters are. Despite the darkness it is hopeful – things are bad, but there are those who are willing to fight, to build a tomorrow they will never see, so that things will be better one day.

Video Games

The video game industry continues to swing wildly between the best and the worst it can be. In the same year that we get Elden Ring and God of War: Ragnarok as examples of the pinnacle of what games can be, we get Diablo: Immortal, a blatant pay-to-win cash grab, and Pokémon Scarlet and Violet releases as a buggy mess with very little in the way of innovation despite being one of the highest grossing media franchises in the world. I’ve always been a bit of a patient gamer, only buying games on day one when they’re a highly anticipated release, but I still got around to a lot of games that were new this year.

Vampire Survivors

I was an early adopter of this tiny little game, picking it up at the start of February in early access. Very, very few games are as much of a value trade as this ended up being. For that $3 price point I got 54 hours of excellent gameplay, and they just released a $2 DLC that I’m excited to get around to diving into soon. For a while, I was keeping up with each patch and collecting the achievements as they came, but I hadn’t played since April until a couple weeks ago and I had a lot of new things to check out when I got back into it.

Potionomics

I was never someone who was interested in dating simulator games. I’d confidently skipped over them all, certain I wasn’t missing anything. Then, I saw someone playing Potionomics on a stream and decided to give it a shot. It had just enough of a game laid overtop that I bought in, and I enjoyed the game immensely. I stuck around for two full playthroughs to get all of the achievements on Steam and I have no regrets. I don’t think it’s completely changed my opinion on dating simulators, but if this team releases another one with another decent game on top, they’ve at a minimum earned my interest.

Dicey Dungeons

A friend of mine played this game on Game Pass and immediately knew I’d love it. That same day he sent me a gifted copy, and he was completely correct. This little roguelike battle game has been an absolute blast to play. The game gives you items to equip on each run that you use rolled six-sided dice to dismantle your foes with. There’s appropriately six characters to play as, each with their own unique dice interactions and mechanics: the warrior can reroll dice to get better results, the rogue wants lower dice values to unleash a flurry of attacks, the robot rolls each dice one-at-a-time with a hard cap on how much their CPU can handle each turn. With lots of comedy buried in the enemy profiles you unlock with each achievement, this game is overflowing with charm.

My Game of the Year: God of War Ragnarok

Ragnarok is a sequel in the most honest sense of the word. Everything about God of War (2018) is improved upon here: the gameplay is smoother, the systems are more developed with more options, things are expanded naturally, and the story and performances are top-notch. Elden Ring is absolutely one of the best games I’ve ever played, but Ragnarok appeals more to me as a person. It would be a lie to say Elden Ring lacks a narrative, but presentation between these two games couldn’t be more different, and I’m a sucker for a great story.

There’s also something to be said for the difference in boss design in these two games. While you have so much more freedom in how you build your character in Elden Ring, there’s certainly a value in the way a God of War boss can have mechanics that require a specific answer to be dealt with. In Elden Ring and the Dark Souls games, what you’re capable of as a character can be so varied that I don’t believe there’s any mechanics in the game that the dodge roll can’t avoid. In Ragnarok, there was a boss that I needed to interrupt with a weapon throw, or a couple mechanics that I could use a specific arrow from my ally to interrupt, and it felt fantastic to go step-for-step in these dance-like encounters. Neither of these design philosophies is better than the other: what you gain in player choice and freedom in Elden Ring is incredibly valuable, while the limited choices you make in God of War can still adjust your playstyle, just not nearly as much as the decisions in Elden Ring.

2022 delivered some truly incredible stories, and I couldn’t be more thankful to have the opportunity to experience them. I’m excited to see what new stories we can share with one another in 2023. As always, thank you for reading. I hope you have a happy New Year, and I’ll see you again soon.

December 29, 2022
D&D: The Imbalance of Hard CC

Some of the most potent spells and features in D&D are focused around locking down enemies and limiting what they’re able to do. These crowd control (CC) abilities are incredibly impactful – when they work, they can completely change the dynamics of a battle. A dragon might be torn out of the sky and forced to battle on the ground by Earthbind, an enemy berserker might become paralyzed by Hold Person, an enemy spell caster might be Counterspelled or Silenced to neuter their ability to battle the party. A Polymorph might entirely end an encounter before it even has the chance to begin.

However, they can be a bit of a gamble. When a player spends their action on many of these abilities, their foes have the chance to resist them with a saving throw and be utterly unaffected, or have some other roll of the dice impact their effectiveness. Between the chance to fail, concentration requirements, and resource cost, these abilities are overall pretty balanced in battle.

But … there’s another facet of this piece of design that isn’t clear from the source books alone. When it comes to the use of these abilities, they affect a player in combat in a much heavier way than the DM’s monsters. And, while there are tools the party can use to address these abilities (attacking a concentrating spell caster, using Dispel Magic or a Restoration spell), it isn’t always something that feels like it’s a good use of their own turn. They might be too far from their allies or their enemies to affect the spell’s duration or otherwise unable to do something about the spell. In the upper levels of D&D, a character might have one of their weaker saving throws targeted and be unable to resist the effect, and in a difficult battle, it might be several turns before anyone in the party can find a moment that they aren’t also dangerously threatened to do something about their ally’s situation.

In effect, a player might be effectively removed from the battle by one of these abilities, leaving them to sit and simply watch the game continue without their input, only making a roll every so often to attempt to resist the effect. Is it good encounter design to disable your players with these spells? These people have all taken time out of their busy lives, maybe they’re even paying for a babysitter – is it fair to them for this to happen? Is it fun?

My players and I have discussed these abilities at length between sessions regularly since my campaign began two years ago. Lately, I’ve been using them a lot less than I ever had before in any 5th edition game I’ve run. We’ve talked about the degrees of effect they use in Pathfinder’s second edition, adjusting spells to function just for one round but to work outright, a stacking bonus or other cumulative effect to increase the likelihood for an affected creature to succeed over time – we still haven’t nailed any specific changes down for our next game, but it continues to be a regular topic.

And this isn’t intended to say that you should avoid using control effects against your players. I only think it’s important to be aware of how these effects sit on the scales on either side of the DM screen. So, today, we’re going to talk about some of the small adjustments we have made, and some of the design built into D&D intended to address CC (and how it still falls a bit short).

Giving the Players an Answer

One way we decided to address these abilities was to put more tools into the hands of the martial characters to use in response to control effects. A Dispel Magic or Restoration spell can end CC from the hands of spell casters, but giving the martial characters some limited use effects to overcome CC themselves had a dual purpose in helping bring them upward in effectiveness to close that existent gap between them and the spell casters.

So, we modified the Fighter’s Indomitable feature, allowing them to substitute whatever type of save they were asked to make with a Constitution saving throw instead when they used the feature. After the change, the fighter almost always succeeded against these effects with his proficient saving throw, but only so long as he had uses of Indomitable. It felt like a measured adjustment – repeated application of lockdown effects would overcome his ability to resist them and require another answer, but a single spell couldn’t neuter the fighter outright.

We also built a new feature for the barbarian I called Rage Against Restraint. When the barbarian was affected by a CC effect, I allowed him to burn a use of his rage to end the effect at the end of his turn. I ended up deciding this was too conservative in its implementation, and I’ve since adjusted it to allow the barbarian to end the effect at the start of his turn for the same cost. It’s also limited further by only having a single use, but I think it wouldn’t be game breaking if it were usable more often, perhaps just costing a use of their rage. This would only become infinite CC breaking at 20th level, and it still has them under the effects until their turn begins, which might allow enemies to capitalize on the effect anyway. Our change to Indomitable allows a fighter a second attempt at the save, potentially avoiding the effect, so when compared, I think Rage Against Restraint is weaker than the change to Indomitable, so it doesn’t need to be so harshly limited.

Both of these features came online for the party around the same time, Rage Against Restraint sort of introduced as a bit of a band-aid fix as we adjusted Indomitable, but I think they’ve both worked out well. I might even in the future include Rage Against Restraint as a feature at 7th or 9th level just as a carte blanche for barbarians at my table.

Experienced players are probably realizing this is a bit familiar to Wizards’ own mechanic designed to aid their bosses against these effects, legendary resistance.

Legendary Resistance: a Poor Compromise (for Monsters)

To ensure a boss isn’t utterly neutered by CC effects, paralyzing them and allowing the party to burst their entire pool of hit points before they can take a swipe of their own, Wizards of the Coast included “Legendary Resistance.” Significant monsters such as dragons and liches and other bosses created for each module published have the ability to force-succeed on a limited number of saving throws (usually three). Each homebrew boss I’ve built has had a number of these to stand their own if the party decided to focus them down outright.

In effect, they’re a tax the party has to pay to succeed in using any lockdown effects against a powerful boss. However, without them, an insistent monk might simply stun-lock a boss and never allow it a turn, neutering the keystone encounter everyone’s been waiting for. These monsters need an answer for these effects, so they can function as a boss, but the design of the feature falls short.

It’s the distilled problem of “save-or-suck” spell design. On a binary pass-fail system, significant monsters need a way to ensure they aren’t as ruined by these effects as their minions are. CC effects are so utterly debilitating in D&D, that they need an answer. If the system was built with gradations of success, such as in pathfinder’s second edition, these abilities wouldn’t be useless at the start of a boss fight.

There’s some quick and easy ways to help make this feel a bit better, with and without adjusting the feature outright. If you don’t want to personally redesign Legendary Resistance, then simply being a bit more descriptive with how a monster overcomes these effects can help. If the dragon is overcoming Hold Monster, describe it angrily snarling through the effect, succumbing until a final burst of rage allows it to escape. If a powerful demon lord is overcoming a Banishment, perhaps he had prepared for the battle with a ward that shatters, consuming the spell, but leaving them more vulnerable against future magics.

For more active adjustments, you could force your monsters to sacrifice health to shake these effects off, or spend some of its action economy on ending the effect. Perhaps as a legendary action that can’t be used until the end of the next member of the party’s turn. You could build your own degrees of effectiveness – maybe your dragon has its speed reduced, suffers disadvantage on his attack rolls, and allows a single critical hit from a melee attack, but that’s the full extent of a Hold Monster’s effect on him, and only for one round maximum. I’m building an upcoming boss encounter for my campaign to have the “legendary resistance” the boss has function a lot like how I’ve built Rage Against Restraint, the creature only able to end these effects on their own turn.

Try things out, take some swings, but if it isn’t a big problem for your table, don’t reinvent the wheel. As long as everyone’s having fun, you’re running an excellent game. Overall, I hope Legendary Resistance receives some more attention in the playtest for OneD&D – I’d love to see Wizards try some different approaches to see if they can land on something better before the next edition of the game releases, but we’ll have to wait and see.

As always, thank you for reading. Good luck out there, heroes.

December 22, 2022
RPGs: Defining Dungeons

“Dungeon” is a pretty evocative term. The mere mention brings to mind buried, ancient ruins of civilizations long past, or maze-like tunnel networks that have been claimed by a dragon and its army of worshiper-supplicants, or a tomb filled with restless undead and traps to prevent access by looters and graverobbers. These all make for excellent adventure spaces in D&D, but it’s unnecessarily restrictive to think these are the only things dungeons can be.

It’s not a stretch to imagine the entirety of a cursed swamp can function as a mega-dungeon that requires days to progress to each small dungeon within its bounds, but even something like a siege or a pitched battle might be best designed to function as a dungeon for your players.

Today, we’re taking a look at how I’ve come define “dungeons” in D&D, and how I use that in my own adventure design.

What is a Dungeon?

At its most generalized, inclusive definition, I look at a dungeon as any gauntlet of two or more encounters in which the party’s ability to rest is restricted. This can be from danger, from time pressure – any reason the party might be unable to lay down and rest and feel completely safe. To return to the “cursed swamp mega-dungeon” example, both of my last campaigns began with “Eth-terel, the Cursed Bog,” a large swamp cursed by ancient magic, forcing any creatures who died within to rise into undeath each night and filled them with a ravenous frenzy.

For the first several levels, the party’s expeditions into the swamp were short-term, never more than a day or two, and they quickly discovered areas where they might be able to rest, but not for free, such as Kortho’s ogre camp. Each night they wished to stay at Kortho’s camp, they had to aid the ogres in defending their walls. For two hours, they were set as additional defenders, and they battled a number of hard-to-deadly encounters with only a handful of minutes between. To earn a rest within the mega-dungeon, they had to survive a gauntlet, something that design-wise was basically a single-room dungeon (a single arena, the walls of the camp and the clear-cut woods immediately beyond).

As the party became more capable and created their own safe areas by removing dangers from the swamp, they were able to progress deeper and deeper and finally reach the center and break the curse upon the land. Other dungeons here included a sunken fort, a compound belonging to an order of religious zealots that intended to break the curse themselves (with an ancient magic that would eradicate a tribe of peaceful lizardfolk as collateral damage), the Wovenwood (a thicket of woods conquered by giant spiders), and nearing the end, a portal into hell, a dragon’s lair, and finally the buried vault of an ancient lord.

More recently, the party arrived at a pirate town, Freeport. The town had become a political powder keg, with the pirate cult of the Leviathan, the Fathomcallers, wanting to drown the world (the party’s at that level these days). They discovered through their prisoner, a Fathomcaller captain, that the gang intended to attack Freeport and neuter its ability to stand against them. Upon arrival, the party marched their prisoner through the streets to the queen’s set, and discovered that their actions caused the Fathomcallers to strike several days before their planned attack.

Beginning at the throne room, the party needed to fight their way down to the docks to recapture the city’s port defenses and return to their ship. They were ambushed in the throne room, they battled foes at one of the city’s major centers, Westwind Square, they had heroic vignette moments to affect the battle at large by spending hit die, they needed to run through a street being raked by cannon fire to avoid another lengthy encounter, and finally took the battle to the Fathomcaller vice admiral upon his ship in the bay.

This quickly became the easiest way I could organize my thoughts when it came to a battle like this in D&D. I knew the party wouldn’t have the chance to rest, so I built in a system to allow them to spend hit die to aid the people of the city, but then use whatever they had leftover at the end of that segment for healing. They had no opportunity to rest at all, and had to budget their resources accordingly. Building it out as a dungeon just made the most sense.

So let’s get into how I organize my dungeon design.

Outlining a Dungeon

As a writer, I like outlines. I usually leave mine pretty open-ended to allow the story room to develop as I go, but I like to nail down the overall vision from the outset. I’ve built my dungeons using an outline structure for nearly half as long as I’ve been a DM, and it hasn’t steered me wrong yet.

In my notes, I had “the Battle of Freeport” as the title, wrote a scenario summary, then went down point-by-point through the encounter spaces. I included a description of the room (its appearance, its function, etc.), what kind of encounter was present (I mostly list these as Combat, Social, Obstacle, or Hazard), and then I have another bullet point describing the details of the encounter (such as enemy types and numbers or the effects of the obstacle / hazard).

And there you have it! A narrow definition of what a dungeon can be is a disservice to the breadth of what you’re capable of doing in D&D, and hopefully you can create even more unique and diverse adventure spaces with that in mind. As always, thank you for reading! Good luck out there, heroes.

December 15, 2022
OneD&D: The Cleric

Last week, Wizards of the Coast released their next set of playtest material for OneD&D: the Cleric and Revised Species. It’s my intention to try and follow each of these drops with a post of my own to help solidify my thoughts on some of the changes coming through before each feedback survey opens, so without further ado, here’s my first impressions.

Species Adjustments: Dragonborn and Goliath Changes

First up, we received a new version of dragonborn that helps bring them more in-line with what I and many other players were expecting after Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons. The breath weapon is back to being a one-attack replacement during your Attack action, it has a scaling number of uses per long rest, and it can even be either a cone or a line attack each time you use the feature. They also threw dragonborn players a bone here with the new Draconic Flight, allowing them to gain a flying speed for ten minutes once per day. I love this ability, I’m excited about the flair of it being made of your ancestry’s damage type (lightning, fire, ice, etc.), I’m jazzed about using it on a rogue or fighter character to keep up with flying foes – a dragonborn might be the first character I make in OneD&D.

Goliath characters also gained awesome new options here with the choice of taking a limited use effect based on the type of giant they’re descended from. Each option feels viable, with them all having different uses and effects that make them really excellent. This was something I myself scratched the surface on in my current campaign: one of my players is a goliath character and I coordinated with him to see if he wanted to be from a specific giant ancestry and adjust a trait or two from the lineage to reflect it. We only ended up changing the flavor of Stone’s Endurance to be based around a storm giant’s innate foresight to allow him to mitigate the damage from a momentary prescience, but it was still a flavorful adjustment. The other new feature present, allowing them to grow large for ten minutes, is kind of just icing on the cake that can create cool moments on its own.

Now, onto the one class included in this UA.

The Cleric

There’s a lot of adjustments here for the cleric. Previously, clerics were one of only two classes that chose their subclass at 1st level in their divine domain. This made some level of sense, of course: you were devoted to a specific deity, after all, so you’d probably already have aligned with one of their domains. With Wizards’ intention to normalize subclass feature acquisition, this has been delayed to third level, and the clerics received a few new things in the trade. First, they now gain Channel Divinity at first level with two baseline options: Divine Spark and the classic Turn Undead. I think divine spark is an incredible addition: it has two options for its own use, as either a straight up heal for an ally, or a potential damage burst for a foe. It’s been constructed with built-in scaling, gaining an additional d8 each time your proficiency bonus increases, and all of this is on top of Channel Divinity now having a number of uses equal to your proficiency bonus.

Additionally, with this iteration of Turn Undead, we have a look at a new condition in the game, “Dazed.” Dazed looks wonderful as a potential replacement for some of the more punishing stuns and other CC effects, since it still allows the affected creature to use either their action or their movement, rather than be completely locked down. Turn Undead also still specifically limits undead to only being allow to move, so there’s no loss of effectiveness for the cleric there.

Next, the cleric gains a new built option with Holy Order at second level. Now, a cleric can choose to either be trained in heavy armor and martial weapons no matter what domain they select, gain two additional skill proficiencies with an added bonus equal to your wisdom modifier, or an additional cantrip and the ability to restore one use of their Channel Divinity on a short rest. They also are able to select a second option later on at 9th level. This puts much more into the player’s hands when they’re building their cleric, and that’s a good direction for the game to be heading in.

We’ll dive a bit more into life domain shortly, so next I’m looking at the new functionality of Smite Undead. This sounds like a straight up improvement to me. Previously, Smite Undead outright destroyed undead monsters below a certain challenge rating, but, usually, monsters that would be destroyed by it were showing up less frequently as you grew more powerful. Now, no matter how strong an undead you’re facing, you can potentially deal damage and harm them.

Blessed Strikes is a transplant from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything‘s optional new features, and I think it’s great to see it become baseline.

And, last for this section, is Divine Intervention. In my opinion, this remains as a very odd feature in the game. It’s both extremely rare for its effect to occur, but also not at all rare if your players are gaming the system a bit and attempting it every day during travel or downtime? In a reddit thread, I saw a comment that proposed a complete redesign: basically, instead of it having the “ask for anything you want” component of the Wish spell, give it the other component – allow it to cast a spell from the divine spell list whether you have it prepared or not without consuming a spell slot. The commentor proposed it allowing you to cast a spell with a 4th level slot when the feature is gained at 11, and then bumping it to a 7th level slot at 18. I personally like this version so much, I might allow any future cleric players to switch to it whether it’s codified into the rules or not.

Life Domain

Life domain remains mostly unchanged here, for good or ill. Their domain spell list has seen a bit of a shake-up: there’s no 1st level spells on the list, Spiritual Weapon has been replaced with Prayer of Healing (more on both of these spells later), Beacon of Hope has been usurped by Mass Healing Word, there’s Aura of Life over Guardian of Faith, and Greater Restoration over Raise Dead. Personally, I think these are all much more fitting or better staple spells to have prepared, so that’s a win.

Disciple of Life has a cheeky little clause addition to close a rules loophole related to Goodberry, which is another good change. Blessed Healer has moved four levels down for its acquisition but remained unchanged otherwise, but that’s counterbalanced with Supreme Healing also staying unchanged and coming up from 17th level to 14th.

Lastly is the domain’s unique Channel Divinity, Preserve Life, unchanged and dropped from 2nd level to 6th. I think, ultimately, this now has a weird place in the system with Divine Spark’s existence. Unless you can really get nearly all of the hit points Preserve Life can restore, I think Divine Spark is generally the better option. Of course, it’s also got potentially many more uses with the new scaling on Channel Divinity, so its power might be fine: you could use Preserve Life to keep your party fighting in a challenging encounter well beyond where they’d normally be toast.

I’m still uncertain if I’m happy with it though. I’ve rarely seen it used overall, and it usually has a lot of HP remaining that it can’t spend when I do see it expended. It might be okay if it spent its pool of hit points to bring everyone in range up to their halfway point, then allowed the cleric to spend what’s leftover however they chose? But that might be overly complicated. Maybe I’ll make a magic item that does that if anyone picks up life domain in one my games in the future.

Now, onto the really controversial stuff: spell changes.

Adjusted Spells

We’ll dive right into the big one here: Spiritual Weapon. The overall reaction here seems to be anger at a nerf to the spell’s functionality, but … I think it’s a good change – a healthy one. The way Jeremy Crawford and Todd Kenreck discussed it in this video (@2:30) in regards to spells that are both effective over the course of several rounds that also extend a player’s turns makes perfect sense to me. As a trade-off, its scaling has been vastly improved, gaining more damage each slot used above 2nd level rather than every second slot level above. I think if its speed were doubled (or at a minimum set to 30 ft.), it would be perfect, because its inability to keep pace with nearly every monster in the game is going to feel even worse now.

Otherwise, I think most of what’s here is a clear positive. Resistance has become another reaction cantrip that makes it much more viable as a pick up. Guidance had its absurdly limited use clause removed and it’s just down to a shortened range to adjust its new functionality. Prayer of Healing is incredibly powerful now that it grants the party an abbreviated short rest with bonus healing, even if a creature can only gain the benefit once per long rest it’s an incredible spell.

The other elephant in the room here is Banishment, which, again … I think is overall a healthier adjustment to the game. Hard CC effects have been a long running topic of discussion between my current players and I (one which has a blog post in the drafting phase), and this spell gaining a roll to end the effect each round just brings it in-line with other similar spells. It does, unfortunately mean that its cool feature of potentially removing the target back to its plane of origin is a much rarer occurrence, but I think there’s potentially other ways that can be addressed here than making it a spell that just utterly removes someone from the fight anyway. Perhaps the spell’s effect can remain even if the creature makes its saving throw, and if you can maintain the spell for the full minute, it successfully banishes the creature. Maybe it can send them back to the demiplane at the start of their turns if they fail the saving throw again, like a reverse Blink. Maybe they can build-in the listed creatures having an innate weakness to this specific spell and they roll against it at disadvantage. I just remember a cleric enemy using this once against a player back when my campaign was much younger than it is now, and the only recourse the party had was to wail on the enemy until they broke their concentration, and the affected player just had to wait for them to succeed.

Well, that’s not entirely comprehensive of the changes presented in this UA, but it is everything I had something to say about. As always, thank you for reading! Good luck out there, heroes.

December 8, 2022
D&D: Player Power Optimization

The D&D fandom at large has baggage with the term “power gaming.” Across the internet, there are thousands of posts bemoaning the practice and deterring new players from pursuing power for their character. Some go so far as to say that anyone “roll-playing” over “role-playing” are unwelcome at their tables; that having even one such guest detracts from everyone else’s fun at their table. And, more power to them. If they think people who play this way won’t gel with their game’s style, that’s a perfectly valid reason to disallow someone from joining your table. It could save a lot of headache from coming up down the road.

But the stigma is everywhere. Which is a little strange, right? After all, it’s perfectly natural to want to be strong in the fantasy game you’re playing. You’re the heroes of the adventure. Not everyone wants to be the farmer kid out of their depth. Some people want to play a veteran adventurer who knows what they’re doing. It can be a great time to be a group of bumbling fools that somehow make their way through a dragon’s lair by sheer luck, and if you’re running a less serious kind of game, that might be the perfect fit.

But if you’re running a campaign that takes itself seriously, with dangerous foes that will challenge the players’ ability to think strategically – why should they be pressured away from making powerful characters?

But this aversion didn’t come from nowhere. I’ve got some theories; I’ve done some research. Let’s sort the whole thing out.

Optimization isn’t the Problem

As far as the D&D fandom goes, there exists a clear, hard line between “min-maxxers” and “power gamers.” And, defined the way I’ve seen, I don’t disagree with the delineation. So, by and large, “min-maxxers” are players who are making the best choices they can with their character to make them as powerful as they can be, and the fandom at large doesn’t consider this a bad thing. Building to get the maximum bonus from your primary ability score early into the game isn’t something they do with their nose pinched so they don’t have to smell the stench. It’s a normal and valid thing to do.

In an ancient post on Wizards of the Coast’s forums in 2006, user Tempest Stormwind made a post to really enshrine the dissonance as fallacious, the Stormwind Fallacy (reposted here on reddit). He concluded “D&D, like it or not, has elements of both optimization AND roleplay in it. Any game that involves rules has optimization, and any role-playing game has roleplay. These are inherent to the game.” It is pointless to behave like either precludes a player from engaging in the other.

But “power gaming” has an entirely different definition: one that newer players might not realize makes it something wholly uglier and less welcome than simple min-maxxing.

Power gaming, in this context, is reserved for players that don’t just want their character to be powerful. They want their character to be the most powerful. They aren’t satisfied unless the other players’ characters are weaker than theirs. They want to frustrate the DM by killing the biggest monster in one turn and ruining the experience for everyone else. Or they want to dictate to other players what they should be doing every turn to have the greatest effect on the battlefield.

In a lot of other gaming spheres, the terms are kind of interchangeable. And carrying that learned understanding into D&D might be a deterrent for newer players, forcing them to think that making their characters strong is something to be looked down upon. Posts still crop up across the fandom to ask why “power gaming” is so hated, what’s wrong with wanting your character to be powerful? And it might be difficult for them to discover that optimizing their character isn’t the issue.

But there is another facet here that’s worth discussing.

The Arms Race

Combat in D&D can quickly become an area of the game that creates imbalance. If you have a table that’s split down the middle between min-maxxers and people casually playing the game, the optimization-focused players are likely to overshadow the casual players’ characters, intentionally or not. If these optimized characters smash through an encounter or two, the DM may scale the difficulty up to ensure that combat doesn’t become an uninteresting slog and remains challenging. The min-maxxing players have further incentive to pursue power to ensure that the challenges presented can still be overcome, and those casual players might be left even further behind.

There’s certainly something to be said for how that can completely change the dynamics of the table. It’s unfair to assume that everyone enjoys optimizing their characters, and if we want to acknowledge that optimization is a way people have fun in games, then we also need to accept that suboptimal play and casual interaction is equally valid.

How can we address that? If we’re playing a game with our friends and they interact with games in different ways, can we come to some middle ground? Is the onus entirely on the DM, or the min-maxxers? Should they tone it down? Or ask the casual player to step up?

My own table could be considered split down the middle. My current party consists of a cleric, a paladin, a barbarian, and a druid. The cleric and paladin have optimized their characters to be strong, while the barbarian is a newer player, and our druid is extremely busy with her job so she can’t put in the time to game the system as well as the others can. What did we do?

Well, we weren’t utterly hands-off when they were making characters. We helped them allocate their points for point-buy, we advise them on feats when they ask, and discussed different subclass options. They’ve built powerful characters in their own right, even if they weren’t specifically engaging with the system to do so alone.

We also approached some rigid rules with some more leniency. For instance, barbarians in 5th edition are most powerful when wielding a greataxe or other d12 weapon, and my player wanted to take the Piercer feat with its synergy for adding more dice to his crits. Rather than force him to use a lance or rapier, I allowed him to just take it with his greataxe.

I also don’t get punitive with the rules. If my players are doing something suboptimal or if they forget to mention something, I don’t hold them to their lack of word, and I’ll remind them that they have another option that they might have been meaning to think of. For instance, our Circle of Stars druid had believed that the bonus healing provided by her Chalice starry form required her bonus action, but I reminded her that it didn’t, and she could still use one during a major fight.

It’s a simple thought for me: if we’re going to have a TPK, we’re going to have one by the rules. If their character is balanced to be capable of something or intended to be able to use an ability, I’m not going to be looking for a specific set of circumstances or a forgotten word to take it away from them. If my barbarian forgets to rage on the first turn, but they still have their bonus action, I’ll let them throw it on and add that bonus damage, even if they already rolled to hit an enemy. I run tough battles, but they’re not balanced to only be hard if they’re forgetting how to play their characters.

It’s a middle ground that works perfectly for my table. All the players feel like they have an equal chance to make big swings in an encounter to affect the battlefield, and no one is left to feel like they’re underperforming. It does require a bit more creativity when it comes to encounter design: more powerful monsters, unique challenges – but I’ve been at this for over a decade and I’m not even close to being out of ideas.

There’s only one wrong way to play D&D, and that’s only if people aren’t having fun. Knowing which rules you can handwave comes with experience, but a good rule-of-thumb is to allow flavor choices through without layering a drawback on a character’s efficiency. If you want to be doing wrestling maneuvers to style your attacks while dealing your longsword damage? That’s no problem for me. Just ask your DM, and I expect they’ll say the same. I always loved it when my players were engaged enough to say more than just “I attack,” chances are they will be too.

As always, thank you for reading. Good luck out there, heroes.

December 1, 2022
Ebonskar and D&D – How Much Changed?

Since its release last year, I’ve made it no secret that much of the story of Ebonskar was inspired by a D&D campaign I ran featuring the titular character as its primary villain. Obviously, a lot of changes occurred to craft a narrative fit for a novel, but many of the characters and facts of the world were kept whole in the adjustment. With today being the one year anniversary of Ebonskar’s launch, I thought it would be fun to invite you to take a closer look at some of the changes that were made.

As a warning, this post will contain some spoilers for the novel, but I’ll do my best to avoid anything too significant.

What characters in the novel originated in the campaign?

Several of the characters I created as NPCs carried over into the novel. In the game, Kheta existed, but she had fled Rafdorek alone. And, she wasn’t responsible for the invention of firearms: she’d just been a garden variety smith who got fed up with the society and decided to leave. She ran the only forge in the town the campaign began in, and was the first clue about where the game was ultimately going to go. One of the first quests in the campaign was to track down and defeat a Hobgoblin Iron Shade that had come to the town specifically to kill Kheta.

Captain Jameson had a different name (Captain Thomas), but his role as guard captain that’s been left in charge of the town because of a pause in greater politics remained. And Lieutenant Nicholas carried over, as did his heroic sacrifice when Ebonskar came to the town.

However, beyond them, it’s almost entirely the hobgoblins that carried over (Redeye, Scalpseam, Charscowl, many others – all names I used in the campaign). Most of the other characters were entirely invented for the novel, or were so fundamentally changed that sharing a name isn’t enough for me to think of them as being the same.

Did the Geren-thal change at all?

All of the Geren-thal with the sole exception of Inquisitor Suthri existed in the campaign and were defeated by the party eventually. Suthri was created for the novel when I expanded Rafdorek’s history and society more than I had for the campaign. An inquisition made perfect sense for the oppressive regime and the original Eighth of the Geren-thal was simply a ranger-styled hobgoblin fighter.

They were set up in a more gamified manner, however. Each one’s rank was an indicator for how powerful they were. Ebonskar was fourth, and the first the party encountered. In the battle, the party had two allies they’d gained that helped even the playing field. Ebonskar was built off of a 15th level fighter, and the players came up against him when they were around level 7 or 8.

Did any of the player’s characters transition over?

No – or at least, not in Ebonskar. Many of the characters wouldn’t work in the more restricted setting for the novel. In the party, we had a dragonborn paladin, a halfling barbarian, and my brothers were a drow gunslinger and a human ranger with a wolf companion. The setting as adjusted for the novel lacks both elves and halflings, so neither of those characters would transition over well. The deregal are more-or-less the dragonborn, so the paladin could work, but I also believe those characters belong to my friends who played them: even with their permission, I can’t say I’d want to write them myself.

The only facet that carried over at all was that my brother’s drow had discovered the plans for firearms when his people had raided a dwarven settlement and decided to hide them from his people and escape to the surface. The dwarves had long ago made firearms and decided they were horribly dangerous and refused to trade them. The other nations of the world tried to force them to do so, and lost what was then remembered as the Thundering War.

So, the deregal are basically dragonborn, the hobgoblins are practically one-to-one – did the Jerrath exist?

They did not! I decided before I got into writing Ebonskar that I didn’t want it to be as sprawling as a D&D setting with a vast array of fantasy races. Orcs are among my favorites of the usual inclusions, and I didn’t want to lose the “these people are just all big and badass” flair with their absence. I started creating the Jerrath, and my first visualizations had them more similar to the Amani trolls from Warcraft than they ended up being. (I had this very well defined picture of Zephal in my imagination: massive, muscular, long curled tusks coming down from his upper lip, a vibrant mohawk. It’s really just the tusks that didn’t carry over.) I also generally like the “we have been here longer than everyone else and we live longer” trait of elven races and how that can add a different texture to a setting, so that got rolled into the Jerrath too. In the D&D campaign, the world was even still named Crucible, only in Elvish!

Obviously the rules for magic are codified in a D&D game, how did the magic system in the novel evolve to where it ended up?

The “vancian magic” of D&D wasn’t something I wanted to copy full cloth into the novel, so I knew I was going to be changing things up. When I was writing Ebonskar, I was playing through Dark Souls III for the fourth or fifth time and happened to be running a pyromancer build. I loved the divide in the game of pyromancy, sorcery, and miracle-based divine casting and the divisions of magic were inspired by that. I love magic in fantasy novels because it can create incredible moments, but without any sort of included drawback having a wizard around can make it difficult to keep tension. Having magic turn into something of a faucet that the spell casters have to very carefully use or risk drowning themselves into nonexistence felt like a good stopgap to allow for some impressive feats that couldn’t solve every single issue the characters came across.

How did Tanda exist in the campaign?

As a different, much more centrally located town called Borno’s Crossing. It began as a bridge over a river along a major trade route before a Trader’s Highway went up and it fell off with reduced foot traffic. The premiere establishment was Brandywood’s, a tavern opened by Borno Brandywood when he founded the town about three hundred years before the campaign. When the party arrived, it was operated by his great-great-niece. A lot of the opening quests did lay hints regarding the hobgoblin threat, but the party didn’t track them down, and their big hurrah before Ebonskar arrived was defeated a hag that had been terrorizing the town for half a decade. Much like Tanda, it did suffer Ebonskar’s presence first in Vromali, and running the game that evening was really something.

As a bonus, I’ve used dndbeyond to create a more presentable stat block for Ebonskar (my old notes were a mess) and had some artwork done up! If you’ve got any interested in using Ebonskar against your players, here’s the stats I made to run him as an enemy against my own party.

As always, thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed this little retrospective.

November 18, 2022