The role of adventurers has evolved throughout the editions of the Dungeons & Dragons game. Initially, they were dungeon delvers, mercenaries, and treasure hunters. But the newer editions portray and depict the player characters as the heroes of epic tales. And yet many groups are little more than lawless murder hobos terrorizing the realm with their insane power levels and destructive capabilities. So I ask you, what would be the opinion of most folk be of these adventurers?  "What is an adventurer? One who goes on adventures? I say that an adventurer is a hero. And what is a hero? A hero is someone with the strength of heart, courage of spirit, and the might of will to go to strange lands and enact violence on the things there. We go to places where there are things that must be destroyed, and we destroy them. Wandering from town to town, getting into trouble, meeting in flophouses and taverns, and getting into scrapes with the law, and otherwise finding ourselves engaged in...

Just got back from The Gamer's Wharf  where I ran the first of two D&D adventures to cover the game slots usually occupied by Brett and Mike. They're both at GenCon and this seemed like a good time to show the group what my style of DMing looks like. I overpacked and under prepared, couldn't find half my notes, and just ran things the way I thought would be most enjoyable. I had fun. The players seemed to have fun. I think it went well and I feel like I set things in place for more adventure tomorrow. It wasn't really certain how many folks were going to make it to the game today. At minimum there was going to be three players, but attendance could have been as high as seven players. That would be a big, hard to manage group, but I prepared accordingly. We ended up with a very reasonable four players; Bob, Brent, Caroline, and Joshua. I made adjustments and things went well. No characters died.  So what happened and how did it go? For starters, that title " Pr...

I'm just gonna do it. Enough talk. If we don't push this bird out of the nest it'll just sit in the tree forever. And with that decision made, I'm going live with the Adventure: Tombs of Cathedra open table.  Saturday & Sunday I'm going to run a two part adventure for the Random Encounter group while our DM is at Gen Con. I'm expecting at least 6 players each day, maybe as many as 8. It's going to be a gang of 3rd level characters and I'm calling part one, Probably an Owlbear , and part two is going to be  The Anchorite Crypt . I've never run a game for any of these folks so I'm hopeful that my playstyle and theirs will mesh nicely and everyone will have fun. Starting Wednesday, and every other following Wednesday, I'm going to be running the open table at The Gaming Warehouse . I've got 3-4 interested players from the opposite Wednesday game that have expressed an interest, and that's a good start. I posted my event on the store...

I saw the Untold Encounters of the Random Kind book on Amazon a while back, and having liked the Loke Battlemats 2-book sets, I added it to my RPG Stuff list. It's a very long list. Today, I found it at one of my local hobby shops, just sitting on the shelf tucked away among a whole lot of other things I wasn't particularly interested in. I picked it up to give it a look-see and my immediate thought was, damn this is a heavy book. It feels disproportionally heavy for it's size. My second thought was, why do they have to wrap all these books in plastic? I'd really like to give it a flip through. It was $10 less than on Amazon, so I bought it. Having taken the plastic wrap off and given it a flip-through, I can now give you my initial thoughts on the thing. It's a heavy, 339 page book of random tables and idea prompts. There's not a bunch of highly detailed ideas and tiny adventures, this is a book of generalities. Which is how I like my ideas. The back cover br...

2024/06/01 Session 11: Denwar Jellies (Campbell, Doug, Gryffon, Ronn, Zak) 12 Winterwane 5023 4.25 days travel from Old Owl Well to Dwarven Excavation. 13 Winterwane 5023 4.25 days travel from Old Owl Well to Dwarven Excavation. 14 Winterwane 5023 Croften Gulch. Outskirts of Weaverville. Oregon Mountain Summit. Made camp just west of the La Grange Mine. 15 Winterwane 5023 Descended into Poison Gulch and followed the river. Eagle Rock Quarry office and Slattery Pond. Junction City. Crossed the Trinity. Deep Gulch. Soldier Creek before Bell Gulch and back into the mountains. They made rough camp on the shores of Soldier Creek where their path would take them away from the creekbed in the morning. 16 Winterwane 5023 A two hour hike up into the canyon brought the group to the denwar excavation at Hayfork Bally. DWARVEN EXCAVATION - Yellow Mold, Black Pudding, Orcs. Dazlyn Grayshard and Norbus Ironrune are denwar prospectors and business partners. While looking for gold in the mountains sou...

Tonight, I spent my Amazon credit to watch Secrets of Blackmoor: The True History of Dungeons & Dragons. It's not great, certainly not something for a disinterested audience, but if you're interested in the history of D&D or RPGs it's very interesting. Features a cast of alumni from the Blackmoor Group which was Dave Arneson's game group. An interesting discussion of how tabletop roleplaying developed and evolved to become the games we know today. Dave Arneson & Gary Gygax brought us D&D, but they didn't do so from a vacuum. There were a lot of other contributions pulled from the community of gamers from which they assembled their game. Much like today, it's the community of gamers all trying to make their games better and more fun that drives this hobby forward. 

  2024/05/11 Session 10: Undead at Old Owl Well (Campbell, Doug, Ronn, Zak) 9 Winterwane 5023 The Order of Righteous Peregrination sets off to investigate the reports of walking dead at the Old Owl Well and deliver a message of warning to denwar miners that the dragon has been making trouble in the area.  It was a hard 3-days travel on simple paths and trails through the forested hills and mountains east of Trinity Lake to reach the ruins of Old Owl Well.  The first day took them past some incredible vista’s, the Fairview Boat Launch where they saw the first eidola since leaving the road behind them, and they would not see another for two more days, and they crossed the Great Dam of the Ancients , which holds in place the entirety of Trinity Lake . They camped rough at Papoose Creek the first day.  10 Winterwane 5023 The second day they crested Trinity Summit , passed beneath the shadow of Blue Mountain , filled their canteens at Quartz Spring , and made a rough c...

Having picked up the Tome of Beasts trio and having been impressed with the content and quality of those products I made the decision to grab the Creature Codex and add it to my collection of 5e books. It's a beast of a monster book, easily twice the thickness of most of my other books. This thing is a fatty. There's something like 400 creatures in this codex, including new varieties of angels, demons, dragons, dinosaurs, and golems. There are entries for a bunch of leader type creatures found in the Monster Manual, like centaurs, goblins, and a more. And a bunch of new undead that will be handy for the Adventure: Tombs of Cathedra setting. The back of the book includes sorted lists of the creatures by type, challenge rating, and terrain. It's everything you would expect from a monster book. There's some text about Midgard, the Kobold Press world setting, but you can use that or ignore it without any real impact. It's all flavor. You might even be inspired by some o...

Hey all, things have been shifting around pretty unpredictably for awhile now. I'm afraid Sunday morning D&D isn't going to work with my schedule any longer and I'm going to drop from the game. It's been great and I've enjoyed playing with all of you. If things change in the future I'd be happy to come back. I'll leave the DnDBeyond campaign up so you all can continue to use it, but I won't be at the table for the foreseeable future.

  2024/04/20 Session 9: Return to Tresendor Manor (Campbell, Doug, Gryffon, Ronn, Zak) 9 Winterwane 5023 The Order of Righteous Peregrination reunited over breakfast. Sildar Hallwinter passed word to them that Gundren Rockseeker was recovering nicely as he headed to his office at town hall. Dartina was complaining about her stomach and that everything still tasted like pond scum and sat in her guts like a live trout when Grista , the denwar from the  Sleeping Giant stormed through the door and straight to their table.  “Here’s the rest of your stuff,” she said, dumping her bag of their missing possessions on the table. “Albrek says to get that skull out of his basement! Today!”  Dartina vomits up an acidic ooze which the party freezes and gives to Darnell Horatio mends the table Party goes to the cellars of Tresendor Manor and finds them vacant and dark. Party explores the cellars, struggles to stay out of the pit trap in the hallway, and finds weapons and eviden...