Tag Archives: Pathfinder

Themes: Entertainer

Both of my ongoing campaigns ended within the last few weeks, and we’re a few weeks away from starting the next ones. I don’t have a campaign to work on for what feels like the first time in years. It’s … Continue reading

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Campaign Songs: Contract of Barl

I’ve spoken before about our campaign theme songs, but only for a paragraph or two. Since one of my campaigns had ended recently, it’s a good time to talk about one in more depth. The Eight Arms and the Contract … Continue reading

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One-Shot Characters in Ongoing Campaigns

One of my favorite tropes in media is the individual face-offs between antagonistic teams. That is, I love it when the good guys meet the bad guys, and the good guys have a genius magician but the bad guys also … Continue reading

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Underpowered: Zodar

Really, the issue isn’t that the zodar is underpowered. I mean, it is, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that the zodar is boring. It doesn’t fit into any setting, it doesn’t provide interesting hooks to the players, … Continue reading

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An Attempt at Truly Improvisational DMing

Over the course of my DMing career, I’ve slowly moved from a rigid style to something looser. When I started off, I was one of those DMs who had to have every beat of the story planned, every NPC statted … Continue reading

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Wish

Some years ago, when I frequented the Wizards D&D message boards, there was a user whose signature said something to the effect of “the spiked chain exists to find the DMs brave enough to ban Core material”. That is, the … Continue reading

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The Art of Art

Our campaigns tend to have three names: an real one, a colloquial one, and a snarky one. I’ve talked about how The Eight Arms and the Memento Mori quickly became The Monster-Hunting Campaign and soon after became The Monster-Friending Campaign. … Continue reading

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House Rule: Three-Axis Cosmology

Especially astute readers may have picked up on this in the last article: …the players suffered a planar travel mishap and ended up on Carceri, the plane of prisons…Instead I told the players on their way out the door that … Continue reading

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On D&D as a Brand

As I’ve mentioned before, I follow professional wrestling, and today I want to talk Sunday’s WWE event, “Hell in a Cell”. Its namesake is the Hell in a Cell match, which is the big brother of a steel cage match. … Continue reading

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Puzzle Bosses

In my career I’ve seen the designers of D&D try to approach boss monsters in several ways. In 3E a boss is a monster with a CR higher than the party level, which usually means it has higher defenses, bigger … Continue reading

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