What’s the Crock Pot? Just a simmering bowl of lentils and herbs, with a dash of DMing observations. Don’t be afraid to dip in your ladle and stir, or throw in something from your own spice rack. Providing news about the community your player characters use as a home base is an excellent way to make the setting come alive for your player characters. The previous post discussed sources of ...

What’s the Crock Pot? Just a simmering bowl of lentils and herbs, with a dash of DMing observations. Don’t be afraid to dip in your ladle and stir, or throw in something from your own spice rack. One way to help players feel like they are taking part in a dynamic setting is to always have things happening in the background. (While mentioning that there’s a two lovebirds snuggling in ...

What’s the Crock Pot? Just a simmering bowl of lentils and herbs, with a dash of DMing observations. Don’t be afraid to dip in your ladle and stir, or throw in something from your own spice rack. One of my earliest exposures to fantasy literature was the comic book "Arak: Son of Thunder" by Roy and Dann Thomas. The 50-issue series published by DC Comics told the hero's journey ...

Let me tell you about the schenanigans my friend and I pulled in the 4E game my wife runs last Sunday: My wife is huge on custom magic items. Some are just little flavor differences, others are completely whole cloth inventions of hers. That's how our party ended up with a magic levitating ship.  While neutrally buoyant and able to be pulled with effort, it requires magic residuum (pricey stuff) to ...

In the D&D Supplement Heroes of Horror (2005, Wizards of the Coast), authors James Wyatt, Ari Marmell and C.A. Suleiman recommend constructing a horror-themed adventure with four components. They are: mood, setting, plot and villain. So, it seemed natural to try and pair that approach with some of the other D&D supplements I had at hand and see what horror-inspired adventure hooks we could devise. Oriental Adventures “A ...

What’s the Crock Pot? Just a simmering bowl of lentils and herbs, with a dash of DMing observations. Don’t be afraid to dip in your ladle and stir, or throw in something from your own spice rack. Screen scene I finally picked up the Fourth Edition DM’s screen. (I was waiting for that perfect confluence of events: store coupon, item in stock and cash on hand). You know the screen ...

Some could argue that the Fourth Edition designers took the bite out of Lycanthropes — literally. The Monster Manual lists only two, the wererat and the werewolf. And making the condition hereditary rather than an affliction makes them no different than shifters, at least thematically. The two shifter templates, for the longtooth and razaorclaw versions, provided in the racial traits section of the Monster Manual, can serve in ...

D&D 4th Edition blog At Will recently interviewed several of the gnomes -- DNAphil, Matthew, myself, Patrick, Scott and Telas -- for their d12 Interviews series, and that interview has been posted today: d12 Interviews: Gnome Stew. The focus of the interview is on D&D 4e, and the hook, of course, is that we were asked 12 questions. We're all felt hats and hot air, so naturally we had ...

The Ghostwalk Campaign Option (2003, Wizards of the Coast) is the gem of my collection of Third Edition gaming materials. Even though it is often overlooked because of its release just prior to the 3.5 revision of the rules, my appreciation for the supplement has only grown in the intervening five years.  And because the setting presents components such as the Tombyards, the Spirit Wood, a nemesis that ...

It’s a given that  your October- or Halloween-themed 4E-dungeon’s going to have a hovering ghost (page 116, Monster Manual) haunting the undisturbed crypt, at least one gruesome hag (page150) stirring a kettle with a noxious brew and a blood-thirsty vampire (page 258) waiting in the wings — so to speak — to strike. But here are some other monsters from that glorious tome you could use to slip ...

What’s the Crock Pot? Just a simmering bowl of lentils and herbs, with a dash of DMing observations. Don’t be afraid to dip in your ladle and stir, or throw in something from your own spice rack. The brew that is Gnome Stew is all about dispensing tasty GMing advice. Frequent readers know I tend to offer a nuts’n’bolts approach to such things. I’m not a gaming theory sort of ...

What’s the Crock Pot? Just a simmering bowl of lentils and herbs, with a dash of DMing observations. Don’t be afraid to dip in your ladle and stir, or throw in something from your own spice rack. D&D’s creators made a bold decision with the Fourth Edition: They scrubbed clean the setting lore that too often was an obstacle to new players learning the game. The complex cosmology, the maps ...

Clem is stirring the Suggestion Pot with this query: “It occurs to me that nobody has said much about ethical screening and training of mages.  Consider: If you are going to enable someone to throw fireballs and petrify people and screw around with the weather, wouldn’t you want to be pretty sure they won’t run amok with the ability?” Spell slingers Judging from how some players have their wizards ...

Combat plays a significant role in most RPGs, and where there's combat there're characters getting hurt. Something I've observed is that rules for healing time are a major factor in setting the tempo of your campaign. How so? Let's consider a few dramatically different approaches: D&D -- Push the Healing Button! D&D in all its forms has always made healing spells, items and potions pretty readily available. How many parties go ...

Some friends drop in looking for an impromptu game. Or maybe they decide to turn left and explore the shaft that leads to a blank spot on your graph paper. Or perhaps the game moved to another location and your prep work was left behind. A disaster in the making? No, an opportunity. A good five-encounter dungeon can easily serve as an evening’s entertainment. So even if your ...