Make Mine a Challenge
August 10th, 2020
Your players announce the following ideas during play, maybe during Downtime, maybe in the middle of an adventure:
- “I want to convince the head of the depository to give me a loan!”
- “The queen is pretty lonely…let’s say I seduce her…I know! Maybe convince her to marry me?”
- “The texts I need to complete this research are in the grand library in the capital? I want to go there to access them.”
- “I’m going to punch this guy in the face for lying to me about his qualifications!”
How would you handle each of these ideas from a player?
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Temple of the Night Serpent
August 3rd, 2020
My first map for public consumption drawn by hand using my own map assets. This was meant to be the centerpiece of a battle against yuan-ti cultists, but COVID has delayed my group’s ability to meet. Rather than allow it to languish unused, I’m sharing it.
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Positions, Puzzle Boxes, Adversaries and More
June 26th, 2020
One of my BitD groups recently had a discussion about play styles due to some questions involving how one goes about negotiating for Position and Effect. One of the players, frustrated by the system, wanted to know what the normal difficulty of an action should be. The thing is, in BitD, there’s no real answer to that question.
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Grains of Gold
March 22nd, 2020
This post was originally scheduled for next week in order to stagger out blog content, but given the current quarantine and social distancing, and attendant bump in on-line groups, I am releasing it now so folks have more to use. Enjoy!
Some time ago, my group thought-and-fought their way through the classic AD&D module Against the Cult of the Reptile God, visiting various of its iconic locations. One of those locations is the Golden Grain Inn, which ended up being important enough to our group’s experience of the adventure that I created a battlemap for all three levels (the ground floor, the upper floor, and the cellar) complete with its trapdoors and secret passages and rooms.
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Keep of the Skeleton King
March 21st, 2020
The first battlemap I ever put together for my group.
This is the courtyard of an ancient keep atop a promontory overlooking a river. A group of orc bandits had taken over the keep and were using it to store the goods they were stealing from caravans and travelers, which they would then sell or trade to river pirates using a winched platform (located elsewhere). Little did the orcs know that buried beneath the keep were dark caverns in which an ancient evil had been sealed…until the adventurers who had come to drive out the orcs accidentally awoke and released it!
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