spilledalestudios

An area of the game where GMs can really stretch their creative muscles is puzzles. No system has elaborate mechanics for puzzles, because it’s not something you can police. Every puzzle is different, and if you reduce it to a series of rolls it becomes, essentially, a waste of time. This is a problem that […]

Important Notice! — The Fist Fighter is now on DMsGuild! — The Fist Fighter archetype first presented here has been polished up and made available to download from DMsGuild.com as a Pay What You Want product. Please consider downloading it from there and making a small contribution to support the continued development of this blog

Last week’s article on skilled dwarf and elf variants had me thinking about other ways a character’s expertise might manifest. In particular, I got to thinking that 5e features in general are about excellence—a character stands out from other people because when they attempt a task, they do it with greater style and power. But

Important Notice! — The Legendary Hero is now on DMsGuild! — The Legendary Hero archetype first presented here has been polished up and made available to download from DMsGuild.com as a Pay What You Want product. Please consider downloading it from there and making a small contribution to support the continued development of this blog

Historically, the Dungeons & Dragons game has had two longer-lived core races: dwarves and elves. Not only are the members of these races able to live to far riper years, but the youth of each respective race matures at a slower rate, not to be considered an adult until they’re far older than a grown

Lately I’ve been playing two video games: Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Mass Effect: Andromeda. This isn’t a review of either game, as this blog isn’t the place for that. Suffice it to say that I think they are both good games, albeit each with its own flaws. However, there are valuable

The Woaven The woaven are an aberration of a nature, a race in which it is normal to have two entirely unique forms linked by a single soul. One of their bodies normally resides in the Dreamtime (see Races of Osse: The Ekidan for a description of the Dreamtime) , a realm to which they

In the Fifth Edition books, you can really see a push to be more inclusive. Heroes of every ethnicity stand proud or duke it out with terrible beasts on the pages of the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide. The Player’s Handbook even explicitly acknowledges non-binary genders. Meanwhile, it’s been a while since official artwork

My current Fifth Edition campaign is called Adventures in Osse, a rather unimaginative but to the point title. As I’ve mentioned before the campaigns of my tabletop group take place in a version of Toril (the world of the Forgotten Realms) that has been altered by the events and consequences of multiple past campaigns. Now,

Shaken I created this condition pretty much by accident when working on the Prognosticators Militant, a new monastic order for monks.I liked the effect a great deal and think it has the potential to be a condition with a wider place in the game.  Shaken represents a state of startlement and possibly anxiousness that prevents