Ben Stovall Blog

Tag: fantasy

Reworking Tyranny of Dragons 1: Greenest

I mentioned last year that I’ve been running Tyranny of Dragons for my table. I used the module once before – back when it and 5e were in their infancy, and I was a much younger DM. I held onto a lot of lessons from running that game, and now, revisiting the module, I’ve made many changes to improve on what WOTC published.

Because, frankly, the module is written as a pretty sloppy railroad.

That doesn’t mean there’s not the potential for a good game in it, though.

Improving Greenest

As the module is written, the game opens with the party arriving while Greenest is under attack. From the road, they can see the smoke from the fires rising skyward and the blue blur of the cult’s dragon ally swooping overhead. There’s powerful imagery there, absolutely, but it also leaves a little too much to chance, doesn’t it? It wouldn’t be unreasonable for a party of level 1 adventurers to see the ongoing raid and think, This is too much for us. We’re nobodies. To assume that to intervene will end only in their own deaths – and the module is printed to begin at first level.

I imagine WOTC hoped that this immediate, dynamic set of encounters would help onboard players into the campaign, but unless you run a really good session zero that impresses upon your players that they’ll be expected to play incredibly heroic to meet the module where it is, it leaves a lot open.

I did two things to improve this.

Starting on the Road

I started with a much lower stakes first session, having our party all be part of a caravan journeying to Greenest from an undisclosed elsewhere. I left it up to each of them to decide why their characters were part of this caravan – perhaps Greenest wasn’t their final destination, perhaps they’d been following the trail of destruction left by the Cult of the Dragon as they raided Greenfields. (As part of our session zero, I encouraged the players to build PCs that would oppose the Cult of the Dragon’s activity and let them know they’d fight a fair amount of dragons throughout the campaign, inviting them to build characters with that style of encounter in mind.)

We had a new player join the table for this campaign, so this slower start also helped them ease into character and the style of table we have. As part of this session, we had a small roadside ambush encounter and an investigation to discover that one of the travelers was a member of the Cult of the Dragon who’d drawn the guard and ambush drakes to attack the caravan. The death of an NPC guardsman ally with family in town gave them a reason to care about at least one group of potential survivors in the upcoming raid on Greenest, and delivering his belongings served enough of a quest to keep them together. (This was all emergent from the play of the first session – if I were to run this module again, I’d consider trying to lean on this further. Maybe I’d make this NPC the captain of the caravan and have them speak to the PCs individually, especially if they were not yet a group, just as mine weren’t.)

(Also, I’d made some tweaks to the ambush drake statblock, but more on that in a later post.)

The other major change – they leveled up from this encounter and investigation. Now at level two, they’d feel at least slightly more powerful for the incoming “dungeon.”

Arriving at Greenest

Map of Greenest from the module.

Time is the most potent tool in the GM toolkit. See, I’d planned to kick off the assault on Greenest at night and I wanted the party to start in the center of town, inside the inn. However, the party was a group of particularly active characters, so I needed to ensure they stayed in Greenest overnight. Thus, After a long day of travel, just as twilight strikes the skies, you finally arrive at Greenest, exhausted and road-weary.

I still had them propose leaving town after delivering the guardsman’s sword to his family to camp, to get that one hour of travel they could still swing based on the time of day. So, even this wasn’t perfect – but it did work.

They ran a few errands in town, bought some supplies, and settled in at the tavern for some character RP. After a few minutes, I, despite having the information available surreptitiously, asked them outright for their passive perception scores. As they handed them in, I paused, then told the PC with the highest total that they began to hear something unusual – a slow thwump… thwump… thwump, muffled not only by the walls, but by distance. However, they were growing steadily louder: Thwump, Thwump, Thwump.

And then, an unconscious stillness shattered against the dragon’s roar.

The Raid on Greenest

I opened with the blue dragon blasting a line of lightning through the town that struck the walls of the inn. Everyone in the party failed a Constitution save and were stunned as the inn trembled and lost one of its walls. They recovered after a few moments – had it been minutes, seconds? And heard the sounds of violence outside!

In the town square, the cultists had swarmed into the market and were swiping goods from abandoned stalls and menacing townspeople. Our heroes erupted into action!

I left many of the scenarios of the raid unchanged, though I adjusted the encounters in some areas. With all the people they rescued from the town square (including their guardsman ally’s family), they delivered them into the keep through the secret passage, then they held off against the cultists trying to breach into the fort, used the ballista to scare off the blue dragon (which required some doing! It had been in disrepair and the fighter literally braced the arms of the ballista on her back to allow the ranger to fire it), then ventured out into the town to reach the chapel of Chauntea to rescue the townspeople trapped within. (Here, I borrowed a little from Ebonskar. While the town burned, the chapel hadn’t caught fire despite the cultists’ attempts to set it ablaze.)

And, finally, as they worked their way back to the keep with these townspeople in tow, they encountered the cult’s lieutenants: Langderosa Cyanwrath and Frida Maleer. (Yes, I changed their names from the module, I didn’t like them much.) As we’ll discuss in the next post in the series, I’d made some MAJOR changes to these characters, including ones I thought would make Cyanwrath more likely to allow the heroes to rescue the people within the chapel – though he still demanded a duel. Our melee-focused sorcerer accepted, got torn apart, and Cyanwrath held to his word (despite Frida’s jeering) and allowed them to escort the townspeople to the keep.

However, there were many other townsfolk who did not benefit from the party’s intervention, and they were carried off to …

The Cultist Camp

I preserved the encounter with some lazier members of the raid lagging behind from the rest, and our party elected to steal their robes to infiltrate the camp. Within, the party was able to see the cult preparing for a mass sacrifice later in the evening – the reason they’d captured the townsfolk to begin with. There were more prisoners than just those taken from Greenest; the cult had taken some hostages from the other towns they’d raided, and it was going to take some serious finesse to rescue them all before the pyre burned.

Luckily, they had an ally within. I made major changes to the module’s character or Leosin Erlanthar – namely, I changed him into an orc monk named Brok Stonebrow. He’s still a member of the Harpers, but one of the members of the party was his protégé, and had come to Greenest with Brok to try and infiltrate the cult.

Surreptitiously, they met in the small caves that wind through the walls of the gulch, and they were able to work with him to devise a plan to rescue the townsfolk. This was almost entirely player-directed – I gave them the scenario, they worked it out from there. They knew they needed to handle the cultists in the watchtowers, and lead the townsfolk around the edges of the gulch to avoid the eyes of the celebrating cultists and mercenaries.

I recognize this amount of freedom might not work with every table, but that’s the benefit of Brok / Leosin not getting himself captured. If your party needs more direction, he can give them more straightforward ideas; at a minimum, he can point their thoughts to the problems they need to solve, to save them from getting stuck on a tangent or lost in the weeds.

The players ultimately succeeded, and this gave me another opportunity to display the cult’s ruthlessness. Rather than cut their losses, when the party later returned to investigate the Hatchery (some more on that in the next post), they discovered the cultists substituted their sacrifice of the villagers with the mercenaries who’d aided them in their assaults. Such savagery would only hint at the things to come …

Wow! That was a long one. Before you go, I wanted to direct anyone looking for further reading right now to the subreddit dedicated to discussing this module. It certainly gave me many ideas that I’ve been using in my game.

As always, thank you for reading! I hope this series of posts will be of use to someone – maybe even just as an example of how we might improve upon the ideas we find within the pages of a module. But, that’s certainly enough out of me; see you in the next one. Good luck out there, heroes.

June 18, 2025
June 2025 Irregular Update

So, here we are again. Look, I won’t beat around the bush. It’s been a tough year, hasn’t it? With everything going on in the world, (especially right now) it’s been hard to get into a space for writing. There’s been a lot of times this year that the only thing that could still my mind at all was this hobby I returned to in December (more on that later).

I’d love to be showing up with great news about a project, but the truth is I don’t have anything to report on. As mentioned before, the Tide rewrite totally stalled out, and I almost got started on something else before getting entirely derailed. And not by video games this time.

So. Let’s dig in.

Returning Hobby?

When I was in my teens, just after I’d been working for a while and had this sudden surplus of disposable income, my friends and I got into the nerdiest hobby on the planet: Warhammer 40k. We assembled and painted overpriced plastic miniatures and played pretend-war on the tabletop and had a blast. Some of my fondest memories are of those days – of visiting a local game store and playing all day, getting everyone some food at McDonald’s or Cici’s Pizza for cheap.

And, my first models for Warhammer 40k were a gift from my grandma. When we started, our friend had gotten the Assault on Black Reach starter set, and two people locked in with the Space Marines and Orks. The original owner of that set settled into Eldar, and I started with the T’au Empire. We played games (not to exact specification of the rules – we never ran objectives and had little in the way of terrain), painted, and enjoyed talking about the game and lore.

I probably hadn’t painted any models in 8 years by the time December rolled around. But, after playing some Space Marine 2 with my friends and peeking at the minis, I finally caved at bought back in, starting with the Orks – the army I’d been leaning toward switching into near the end of our original time in the hobby.

See, as teens, we all painted our share of orks. Our friend had more bodies than he could paint himself, and we were all happy for the practice. I got pretty good at painting orks, and, honestly? I think I’ve retained that skill.

It’s been a much needed piece of serenity these last few months, and with the friends I’ve made in my guild on Warcraft, we’ve got our own little meta forming; one guy’s playing Death Guard and Custodes, another’s on Dark Angels and he’s brought in a friend playing Votann and Chaos Knights; we’ve got players on Tyranids, Imperial Guard, and Necrons. I’ve gotten a fair few games under my belt, and I’m looking forward to trying to find some time to play in person at a local store again. (We’re all across the continent, so we’ve been playing on Tabletop Sim.)

So, that’s been my main focus the last little while. It hasn’t entirely stamped out writing, of course. I’m still running a D&D game weekly, and I’ve been running a once-to-twice a month game for my family. And, I’ve written little bits of lore about my army of Orks and the characters therein, written up some small narrative moments from some of the battles we’ve had.

I mean to say I’m still exercising the muscle, even if I don’t have a book to report any progress on.

… But You Will Write Another Book, Right?

Yes. Yes, absolutely.

Look, there’s been times when this has been disheartening. There’s been times when I’ve questioned whether it was worthwhile to keep paying the upkeep on the site and blog – especially since I have these long stretches where I do nothing with it. But, ultimately, writing means a lot to me. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care if no one read me – I want my stories to mean something to people.

For that to happen, though, I have to write the damn things.

So. I’d better do it then, huh?

How’s About the Blog, then?

Oh, yeah. So, you might’ve noticed the new digs. I’ve changed hosting services, and, after all the work I put in over the last week to set this all up, I’m going to hit myself if I keep letting this slip through my fingers.

I get into my head about it, is the problem. I often feel like I have little to add or nothing of note to say. But this is my corner of the internet. If someone doesn’t want to hear what I have to say, they can good and damn well leave, can’t they?

And if you’re one of the ones sticking around, thanks. Thank you for reading.

I’ll see you again in the next one.

June 12, 2025
Homebrew Mechanic: Heroic Vignettes

In my tenure as a GM, I’ve never been fond of encounters with a clear outcome. Spending upwards of half-an-hour running turn-by-turn combat where the characters are only in danger if they play extremely foolishly just doesn’t entice me. A battle needs stakes to be interesting at all, a chance for the party to fail, a consequence looming overhead, or it feels rote and my narration of events suffers from my disinterest.

At lower levels, every fight can carry a threat of permanent character death from poor decisions or poorer luck, but as my party reached the higher tiers of character power in my campaign, I needed a new solution. They had many enemies that had their own wealth of resources to bring to bear, but running every battle against an array of grunts or mooks was just going to waste time we could spend on more interesting battles.

So, I devised Heroic Vignettes. I mentioned this idea in passing in my Defining Dungeons post, but I’ve since had another chance to use this mechanic and I think it’s got real teeth. So, what better place to share it out than here?

The Basics

The idea began with me wanting to give my players a chance to use their hit die to recover from a battle when there absolutely wouldn’t be enough time for a short rest in our 5e D&D game. However, they had all of their hit die available to them, and I didn’t want them to be able to just spend all their hit die to reach full health without a worry. So, I created small instances – scenarios where a hero’s intervention would ensure a heroic result. As an example, my first use was during an attack on a city, and some townspeople were trying to evacuate some children, but the invaders were charging to slay them. These attackers were not going to be threatening to my party of 16th level adventurers, but they would annihilate the children and their shepherds.

So, electing to intervene, I asked the table to expend four of their hit die. Any of the four players could choose to expend the cost and in any variation: one player could spend four, intervening alone; they could have two characters split, each spending two; or all four of them could spend one. Whatever their decision, they spent the required hit die and rolled it, suffering whatever they rolled as incidental damage from the skirmish.

There were several more instances where they could spend their hit die and intervene, then, at the end of the gauntlet as they approached the next battle that would be run in initiative, I allowed them to spend whatever hit die they had left to heal as if from a short rest.

I also told them that would be the intention from the start. As we launched into the heroic vignettes, they all understood that any hit die they spent intervening they would not be able to use later to recover. But, they were quite high level adventurers with many hit die at their disposal, and they elected to intervene in each scenario I’d built and still recovered well for the further fights.

Open-Ended Vignettes

Just last week, I used this mechanic for the second time. My party is now four 20th level adventurers, making their way toward what might be the final boss encounter of the campaign. They’ve come to a land to slay a primordial elemental that was never meant to be on the prime material plane, but there are two forces they have to contend with: the Tempest Faithful, a cult devoted to this living storm, and He Who Has Laid Claim to the Skies, a storm giant who has gained the allegiance of a goliath clan to attempt to shackle the Primordial Tempest to their will and reclaim the ancient glory of their people.

This tribe of goliaths had attacked a flying city home to a clan of dwarves, Ava Dannad. The goliath tribe is massive, swollen with conquered tribes from elsewhere on the continent, but they are pretty run-of-the-mill combatants. Without attacking in ludicrous numbers, they shouldn’t serve as much of a threat to a party of four 20th level heroes – these are some of the mightiest people that may ever exist, after all.

My players wanted to strike into Ava Dannad using Transport via Plants and make a ruckus to draw out the storm giant and the tribe’s leader to battle them before they reached the Tempest. Rather than run several rote encounters with minimal danger, we launched into freeform heroic vignettes. I asked them to tell me how they would like to draw out or incense the goliaths and then we worked out how many hit die they might spend for each battle, and rolled to tally a score that once attained would successfully draw the giant from his perch. They also had a deadline as the giant was having the flying city crash into a mountainside.

They had several great ideas, using skills or the environment, using details about goliath culture they knew to incense them, casting Daylight on themselves to make a beacon visible through the storm raging all around to draw their enemies in. For each hit die they spent, we rolled 1d10 (with a few other bonus die thrown in for particularly good ideas) to rack up to a score of 200 that they needed to get the giant to come fight them. It still came down to the wire, with the battle against this storm giant and the champion of the goliath tribe meeting them when the city was a mere 5 rounds (we rolled 2d4) from crashing into the mountainside. And, as before, they were allowed to spend their remaining hit die to recover before that encounter and it still was a tough fight.

So that’s Heroic Vignettes. It accomplishes a lot in maintaining scope and world consistency without dragging extra hours of easy encounters into the field. I’m interested to see how I might be able to adapt this mechanic for Pathfinder in the future when we start using that system. For now, I think it’s a wonderful tool for 5e D&D games, and every tool we can put into our toolbox as GMs enriches our games all that much more. As always, thank you for reading! Good luck out there, heroes.

April 18, 2023
Warcraft: Mythic+ Affixes Are Overbearing

Since its addition in Legion, Warcraft’s Mythic+ dungeons have become an insanely popular endgame activity. I’ve participated in most seasons, missing only seasons 3 and 4 of Shadowlands while I was unsubscribed. Overall, it’s been a huge boon to the game. Mythic+ serves as a PVE activity that doesn’t require the level of investment and set-up that raiding needs.

The system has survived some large changes since its inception. Fortified and Tyrannical were originally envisioned as a hurdle for keys beyond level 10, but are now present on all keystones. We’ve seen several affixes nerfed, rotating seasonal affixes, and some that have been introduced and removed entirely.

Presently, Blizzard is testing a new slate of affixes on the Public Test Realm, and much of the player base has had few kind things to say for them. Many players find the affixes to be unduly impactful, to the extent that players have to focus more on avoiding the negative consequences of failing the affixes over battling the mechanics designed specifically for the dungeon.

Others claim this criticism is the whining of a player that lacks the skill to engage with the affixes as they are. However, many of the top-rated Mythic+ players share these opinions, as I do. And, while I’m certainly not in the realm of the very best players, I’ve never lacked the ability to attain the goals I chase in the game.

But, as a pre-emptive counter to anyone who would discredit this post on the merit of skill or accomplishment, here is my raider.io profile. I have two characters beyond the rating threshold for Keystone Hero and several Keystone Master achievements.

Now, let’s talk affixes: new, old, and philosophically.

Playing the Affix

The most criticized affixes are the ones that become so intrusive to the standard gameplay that they overshadow the usual dungeon experience, such as Explosive and Sanguine.

With Explosive, we are constantly battling our UI to kill these priority target bombs before they explode for heavy group-wide damage. For many players, the task of killing these bombs falls on the healer’s shoulders – at the lower levels of play, players are unlikely to swap targets and kill them, while at the top-end of play, the group loses the least amount of damage throughput if the healer defeats them all. Since these spawns scale with the number of enemies engaged, many orbs might be active at once, rolling throughout the duration of a fight. On the PTR over the weekend, there was an adjustment in testing to make these orbs several more times durable, but with a reduced spawn frequency.

Now, conceptually, I don’t think this was a bad direction. However, the pool of hit points tested over the weekend was bloated such that players were simply ignoring them outright with their spawn cadence. I’d prefer to see the spawn rate reduced further, but I think another nerf to both values would be an even an even better adjustment. UPDATE: Blizzard has since proposed a huge change to the functionality of Explosive orbs, having them instead shield enemies based on the health remaining instead of damaging the party. I think this would be better for the experience of the affix, but I don’t think it addresses much the feeling of playing against the affix over the dungeon. We’ll see how it works when that begins testing.

Then, Sanguine requires a dedication to movement and area control beyond what is usually asked by the affixes or base dungeon mechanics. Even the tools players bring to aid the tank in repositioning monsters are suspect in many scenarios, with enemies that are immune to knockback and grip effects, or uninterruptible casts, which adds an element of target prioritization on top of this affix’s asks. I think it’s wrong to say that all affixes shouldn’t affect tanks because of the role they play in the group, but I think Sanguine is a bit heavy handed in that it requires the tank’s engagement the most with minimal impact from the other players.

There’s even a couple more affixes that have been adjusted since their introduction, but would’ve fit here before: Bursting and Bolstering.

Bursting changes the way every pull in a dungeon should be played, with the enemies afflicting the players with a stacking damage-over-time effect for each enemy they kill. This extends the danger of a pull beyond the point where the monsters are dead, and asks for halting damage to prevent refreshing the damage effect’s duration. It’s since had a change to make it dispellable, allowing a class-utility counter to make it much more bearable with a priest’s Mass Dispel, but I haven’t chosen to run a dungeon with this affix without a priest all season, and not all groups have that luxury.

Bolstering once called for adjusting target priority on many pulls in a dungeon, but the new duration limit on the buff has significantly reduced the impact of pulls with one monster of higher health than the smaller creatures around it that die from passive cleave.

And there’s many more affixes that contribute negatively to the experience of running dungeons without overtaking the gameplay loop to the degree of those above outliers. Quaking hits casters harder than tanks and melee players by interrupting their casts and has required multiple specific exceptions to be installed to avoid catastrophic overlaps; Raging can create unavoidable one-shot damage instances with the only counter being large defensive cooldowns or limited soothe effects; Overflowing affected some healers much more negatively than others; Necrotic and Skittish put more responsibility on the tank in an unfun way; Inspiring created painful monster groups by restricting the use of the class tools we had to overcome dangerous enemies; Infested and Beguiling were infuriating to deal with throughout their respective seasons.

And I think it’s bad for dungeon affixes to exist solely in this space – to add only annoyance to a dungeon. These were originally created to add variance to the dungeons week-to-week, because, for most people, running the same encounters ad infinitum would get stale fast.

But Blizzard doesn’t seem to agree. Let’s look at those new test affixes.

Our New Afflictions

So, available for testing over the weekend, we had Incorporeal, Afflicted, and Entangling. Despite the callout, Afflicted looked to be the least offensive of these three. It functions a lot like explosive, but in reverse. A ghost spawns with low health and dispellable afflictions. Removing any of these effects or healing the ghost to full health removes the ghost. Should the ghost be left alone, it afflicts the party with a Haste reduction (which we don’t want). Unlike Explosive, the affix is presented more directly healer-facing. They can address it with their usual game play, and hybrid classes can ease the burden at low-cost, and I think both have factored into its reception thus far.

Then, there’s Incorporeal, which has been adjusted a bit for the better since the weekend’s testing, but I still think could use a redesign. These creatures require direct crowd control effects or kicks to prevent them from massively hampering your group, but you generally would like to invest those abilities into the dungeon’s monsters instead. However, since it’s intended that they be immune to damage, and things like Blind, Polymorph, Hex, or Hibernate would deal with them completely, I think they’re not in as worse a place as they were when those effects were breaking.

And, last, we have Entangling. Like Quaking before it, this affix is just going to be at its worst creating painful overlaps with the dungeon’s mechanics. I know it’s going away next season, but imagine this effect occurring during Odyn’s runes in Halls of Valor. That extra delay of movement could spell catastrophe for an otherwise successful key. In Blizzard’s post, they do talk about increasing the visual clarity of the effect, which was a pain point for testers over the weekend.

Even as unintrusive as Afflicted looks, these affixes are all still annoyances to be layered onto the game. But I think it’s wrong to behave like that’s the best or only avenue to add challenge to the game.

Examining the Philosophy

In the past, I had discussions about my grips with the Mythic+ system and often talked about Hades, an isometric roguelite with fantastic game play. After you’ve had a successful clear or two, the game opens up a “Heat” system, where you can elect to add on additional modifier to make the run more challenge, and more rewarding.

There’s options here that would be an annoyance if they were prescribed: enemies need to be hit a number of times before they begin taking damage; monsters can deal up to 100% more damage and have up to 30% more life or both; you have to sacrifice a boon to climb between the underworld regions; you put yourself on a timer. Yet, these never felt intrusive because of two reasons: one, they affected the “Heat” of the run at different values, so harder affixes increased the rewards more; and two, you picked every single effect you were going to deal with on a run. So, why the hell doesn’t Warcraft do it that way?

Well, as far as picking your poison goes, I don’t think it would work as well in Warcraft. Hades is played solo, while Mythic+ is a 5-man group activity with the active player base of an MMO. Everyone having the same affixes on their key every week is good for people forming and joining groups. It just wouldn’t work as well to go from Volcanic in one key to realizing you have Spiteful ghosts chasing you down on the next.

As for the former, there is a built-in rating system for Mythic+, and Tyrannical and Fortified already provide semi-separate score values, but I don’t think increasing the requisite investment to have all players engage with every affix would be health for the game. Currently, you can get a real decent rating on one month’s subscription, but if every affix had its own point contribution, it’d take several weeks to clear your scorecard of any zeroes.

So, fundamentally, I think affixes-as-annoyances is a bad design space for Warcraft. It is good for the process of grouping to have keys prescribed for the week, and detrimental that we cannot opt-in to the annoyances.

So, I’d propose–

Affixes-as-Boons

I think affixes should exist. Tyrannical and Fortified don’t need to go anywhere; they do a lot of the legwork in modifying the week-to-week experience in these dungeons.

But positive-effect affixes – even built as a reward for engaging with something like Afflicted – would be better than what we have. I don’t propose this as a way to make dungeons easier; I’d want to see it paired with an adjustment to the overall scaling, so that obtaining the benefits from the affixes would affect the dungeon’s success.

I wouldn’t even begrudge the existence of an annoyance affix paired with a boon affix. Just by virtue of design, the affixes will always be less interesting than the dungeon mechanics, because the affixes must be designed to be applied to all the dungeons, whereas a boss or monster pack have a lot more freedom in their design space.

What affixes do to add variety to dungeons in the long-term is valuable, but instead of each week ending with the sentiment, “That goodness I don’t have to deal with that anymore,” dungeon affixes could instead foster excitement for the gameplay opportunities they provide. At the very least, I’d be interested to try.

As always, thank you for reading. I’m looking forward to starting the climb all over again in season two, even with all my complaints. I just wonder if things can be better. Now, to get after these last few portals for my paladin …

April 6, 2023
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
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