Dragonlance D&D Game Blog

Recently, while prepping for an upcoming D&D session, I was re-reading the module (I always review the 3 or 4 encounters I think the party will get through during an upcoming session) and I noticed two things: the seemingly underpowered opponents the module was calling for, and the repetitiveness of the encounters. The previous session, my players ended up having 2 of the three battles that evening against stirges, which I don't think are interesting enough to take up 67% of the combat. It just so happened that the party went from encountering them in a room, to the main lair where the rest of these fantasy-mosquitoes hung out. In retrospect I should have gone "off script" and changed up the encounter, running something else in that second room, and had the stirges menace both groups, or moved the stirges' lair to another room, or dropped them all together. That's sometimes one of the downsides to running pre-made modules, and I'll talk about in anothe...

As the new proud owner of a Dwarven Forge - Room Set, I was very eager to use it in my game at the first opportunity. But I had no easy way of planning what rooms I could layout with my one set. I could, of course, pull the actual pieces out and arrange them on my dining room table, but I'd like something a little easier. I've also seen references to some PC programs that would help with the planning task, but I'm a Mac guy and I wasn't looking for something that elaborate (maybe if I had a bunch of sets that might be more useful), but for me and my single set, I was looking for something quick and low tech. Basically, all I really wanted was a PDF with paper versions of the pieces in the Room Set that I could print, cut and arrange as needed. The nice thing about the PDF is that if I had multiple versions of a given set, I could just print out extra copies. Or, if I was planning something elaborate, I could print out as much as I needed and that would show me ho...

Exile on Taladas We take a slight break from the regular Dragonlance comic reviews to take a look at this interesting little gem I recently uncovered. While I was an avid reader of the Dragonlance comics, I also dabbled in some of the other TSR/DC comics of the day. I read the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons comic for at least the first year, and the Forgotten Realms comic through it's entire run. Some of the other titles, like Spelljammer and Gammarauders, I only read a handful of issues before moving on. So I was very surprised recently when I learned that this issue guest-starred Riva Silvercrown, the only ongoing character in the Dragonlance book. If you're not familiar with the Spelljammer setting and concepts, check out the wikipediia page for some reference information. The story starts off with a spelljamming ship crash landing on the Krynn continent of Taladas. Riva and Ktarrh see the burning ship from the skies and investigate. On the ground, a lone human...

This has nothing to do with Dragonlance or Dungeons and Dragons, and yet every word I write, every digital image a create, every post, tweet, or status update usually involves one of the many devices he brought about that has helped usher in the world we all live in.