Dragonlance D&D Game Blog

Recently during my weekly D&D game, I had my players tracking an NPC in a city with the purpose of abducting and getting information out of him about a greater villain they sought. The only known location the NPC could be found was a local brothel he frequented on a regular schedule. Since I didn't have any brothel maps in my collection, it was off to the Internet. I thought this was going to be a fruitless search, when what to my wandering eyes should appear? An article on a former brothel for sale, complete with a floor plan of the building. Jackpot! Since I wasn't planning on combat in the brothel, I didn't bother to make a battle map out of the floor plan, but I did have it on hand for reference as the PCs scouted out the interior of the building, as they checked out this room or that. Anything on the map that was modern, I just changed to some other type of room, or left the door locked. In case you need such a building in your own game (for whatever reas...

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...