Dragonlance D&D Game Blog

Over the course of many Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, I've often, but not always, used a calendar to track the progress of the campaign. It can seem like a lot of work with little payoff, but that doesn't have to be the case. If done correctly, you can keep the workload to a fair balance, and the payoffs can be great. So, here are five reasons you should be using a calendar to track your campaign Session Notes  A campaign calendar can be a great place to track session notes. By simply tagging the notes to the month and day of the event, you know what the heroes have been up to and when things happened. For mundane tasks, like fast travel, I just mark the start and end dates of the travel, where they left from and where they arrived. Back in previous editions when characters trained to gain a new level and would level up at different experience point values, I used the calendar to track who was training and who was free and sometimes could squeeze in a short adventure or...

This sheet is great for a simple game where you've already decided to drop skills and feats out of the game (certainly doable in 5e). There is a small corner with a few helpful hints, but the white text on light purple background might be hard to read when printed. I was recently asked by a friend if I knew of any versions of the Character Sheet for D&D 5e geared toward kids. Seems he's teaching his children the game, and I applaud him for creating the next generation of D&D gamers. I've also been thinking of starting to teach my son, and maybe a few other kids the game, so I began looking around for alternate versions of the classic 5e Character Sheet that could be used with new players or kid players. I found a few that all seem to have some merit, so let me present my findings and you can decide for yourself. Some small, simplified sheets (not just for kids): The first is this nice simple sheet . The sheet has some color coding. It's a great she...

Last post , I talked about rediscovering an older 2nd edition product, and how, after re-reading it, found it's almost as useful today as it was back then. After that realization, I decided to go back and dig up the companion product to Dungeons of Mystery, Cities of Mystery and give it a second look. Cities of Mystery actually came out before Dungeons of Mystery, but I didn't buy this when it first came out, so these reviews are actually in purchase order, not release order. Turns out Cities is, like Dungeons, almost as useful now as before. Of the 64 pages of content, the only useless material is the few monster stats the book provides in the City Adventures section, and that's only because they are in 2e format. The other 99.8% of the book is just as relevant today. Like Dungeons, this book provides a top down look at cities, from such broad ranged topics as where to locate them, to what types of governments and rulers run the city. This is great if you have no idea...

I was going through some old gaming materials, part of my 2e collect, and came across the remains of this little gem: Dungeons of Mystery. This was one of a number of products that came out in the second edition days to help facilitate using miniatures in your game. This set focused on dungeons (not surprisingly) and provided a number of dungeon themed maps that could be flipped and turned and pieced together in different ways to make each time you used the maps unique. The product, a skinny boxset,  typical of many other similar 2e releases, also included fold-up cardboard rooms that you could use to build out a dungeon lair. The set did come with a variety of room sizes, and a few other flourishes, like stairs and an alter set up for key encounters. Also there were "doors" that you could attach to the fold-up walls anywhere to show where the door would be for a given room. I remember building out some, or maybe even all, of the "rooms", but these were real...

Do you know the enemy? Do you know your enemy? Well, gotta know the enemy -- Green Day - Know Your Enemy Images can be a powerful tool for DMs. Some of the earliest D&D modules (i.e. Tomb of Horrors ) included illustration books that helped DMs to further show what the PCs were seeing at certain key moments and locations in an adventure. Also, along those same lines, miniatures not only help show where everyone is during a given moment of combat, but the sculpts and paint jobs also help clarify who or what the PCs are fighting (otherwise you could just use chess pieces for positioning). Another area where images can be very useful is for key NPCs. In any adventure there are usually one or two antagonists for the PCs to face, from the town mayor, to "the evil necromancer" to the "goblin king". For some of these characters (the necromancer and the goblin king) miniatures might be useful, but for the town mayor, a miniature isn't probably very useful,...

No other component of rpgs, from the earliest versions of Dungeons and Dragons to the latest Pathfinder or 13th Age releases, is more iconic or necessary to the game than The Map. The Map helps new and experienced DMs quickly describe a dungeon, lay out a town, or, in some cases, set up a temporal flowchart of actions and events. And the chief tool for setting any of these up is graph paper. Now graph paper is readily available in office supply stores and most retail stores. At 4 squares per inch, a single 8.5" x 11" sheet of typical graph paper yields 34 x 44 squares, which at 5ft per square (the de facto scale of modern maps) ends up being over 37,000 square feet of area to map. For most maps, this should be more than enough area, but what if you need something else? Maybe you want more area for a larger map, or to detail a major city, or what if you're like me, and you want extra area around the map to add all sorts of notes and legends? Then you might want to ch...

In previous posts, I've mentioned how much I like and use minis, and various other props at my gaming table. Along with all those props are the battlefields they stand on. I currently use a number of different options depending on the need. First and foremost is my trusty erasable battle mat. There are plenty to choose from, but I tend to like Flip-Mats from Paizo. These mats allow you to use dry erase, wet erase, and (according their literature), even permanent marker and still remove it when you are done. On side of the Flip-Mats usually has a specific scene, like a forest crossing, a dungeon, or a town square, while the other side is sometimes a simple color pattern, like dark gray for the dungeon stone, like gray for paved city, or green for forest. Since I'm in the middle of running a lengthy dungeon crawl, I have the handy dark gray mat in the DM kit. The nice part about the scene specific side of the battle mat is that there is usually enough detail to get any D...

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...

For a while now I've been looking for ways to give back to the hobby that I love so much. I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons since 2nd edition AD&D. During my earlier years, I had created a bunch of forms and props and other content for my various games, but not so much during the 3.x and 4e years. Recently, I was prepping a game session and I knew I was going to have a bunch of spiders menace the PCs. This meant I also needed to account for spider webs. Then I recalled something I built back in my 2e heyday, pages and pages of tokens, standups, etc, including a page of various sized web tokens. Since I'm not an artist, these tokens are all based on the same piece royalty free clipart I had available. So click on the image here to be taken to a page for the PDF download. If you like the product, let me know, and maybe I'll dig up some more of my older game content for future posts. Note: Don't let the 4shared preview scare you. The page looks like the im...