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...

If you're a Dragonlance fan, and a Dungeons and Dragons 5E fan, you'll definitely want to take a look at the recent Unearthed Arcana article on the Wizard's site. This new article series on the site presents unofficial rules, or rules in development for the game. This recent article goes by the unassuming title of "Waterborne Adventures", but for the Dragonlance fan should be "Rise of the Minotaur" since the article presents, for the first time, rules for minotaur PCs. In addition to the minotaur race, it also includes a Mariner fighting style, along with some goodies for rogues and sorcerers. One of the things I enjoyed most about the article were the sidebars where the designers gave their behind the scenes commentary about what they were accomplishing, and how to apply the same principles to other race or monster modifications. Since its only a 5 page article, it's a quick read, and well worth the time, Dragonlance fan or not.

In our previous two project posts, we looked at building chairs and tables (and benches) . In this part, we'll build on the previous two articles and look at ways we can dress up those tables with a bit more detail to really help bring a scene to life. And the best part is, Lego has already done most of the work for you. Let's get started... Imagine the PCs come in to a bar/inn and look around. You can set up a couple of tables, each with something on the table to hint at what the NPCs are up to and maybe how the PCs might approach them. If the NPCs are drinking out of mugs or goblets then the PCs might want to buy the next round. But if the NPCs are playing cards (and winning or loosing money) then the PCs might want to join the game. If there's a big feast going on, complete with various meats and breads, laid out on nice dinnerware, then those might the kind of people willing to hire the PCs. And lastly, you ca...

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...

A couple of months ago there was a pair of competing Kickstarter projects, one from UpWorks and another similar themed one from Miniature Building Authority . Sadly, through no fault of the projects competing against each other, the UpWorks project went belly up . But today I'm happy to report on two Kickstarter projects currently running that are so complementary that backing one almost necessitates backing the other. First up was a nice little Kickstarter project called Tavern Dungeon Decor . This KS gives you a bunch of accessories and dressing for any number of public places, like taverns, temples, or libraries, just to name a few. The KS provides everything from a variety of chairs and tables, to bookshelves, books, plates of hot food, and even a bunch of seated patrons to dress up your city based encounters. What the KS doesn't provide are the walls or rooms for said buildings. And that's where the second KS comes in. This is the latest Dwarven Forge Kickstarter...

Another year, and another fiasco trying to get a GenCon hotel room. This year, they claimed to have a new solution (read, untested) that was supposed to alleviate the issues of last years mess. Sad to say, all it did was create a whole new set of issues for people. I'm sure you can read all the gory details elsewhere, but here's my story: I got my 4-day badge on Saturday, with no issues, not that I've ever heard of any issues getting badges. According to the website, I was to come back to the housing page around noon (I was on the page 15 minutes early) and at noon, I would be assigned a time to be able to get in to housing. I was assigned a 15 minute wait time, and figured I was pretty lucky. It would be the last time I would think that... The page had a nice countdown clock and as soon as the time passed, the Reservation button was active. As soon as I clicked on that button, I got an error message. STATUS : ERROR StatusID : 3 GUID : 14b0354fcdf:-70ee48 ERROR ...