Magic Realms

February 9, 2024

After griping about delays on Unbound and Kickstarter projects a year and a bit ago, I've succumbed to another... A follow-up of sorts to Dice Men, Magic Realms by Ian Livingstone and Jonathan Green purports to be "the definitive collection of iconic art from the worldwide phenomenon of Fighting Fantasy." The Fighting Fantasy books were for me an early introduction to the classic covers and...

An epilogue

February 4, 2023

An epilogue written for the end of the third chapter of long-running D&D campaign that began with Tomb of Annihilation, continued with the destruction of an arcane prison held hundreds of feet above Port Nyanzaru, and concluded with a murder mystery which lead to eldritch horrors from the deep - an adapted The Styes from Ghosts of Saltmarsh. Port Nyanzaru, 28 Eleasis, 1492 DR...

Dice Men

December 5, 2022

Recently - finally - I received my copy of Dice Men: The Origin Story of Games Workshop through the post. Having dived back into the hobby in 2016, the announcement of this book being written and produced on the Unbound platform had my inner kid filled with excitement and nostalgia. Like so many others I'm sure, my earliest introduction to this world was through Sir Ian Livingstone and Steve...

Evolution of a regional map

April 9, 2021

Last month I wrote about our new D&D campaign in the homebrew world of The Fading Lands, and the map I put together for it using the fantastic Inkarnate. We've now started the second arc or chapter of the campaign, and I thought it would be good to collate the various iterations of the map in one place. In using Inkarnate, we are able to return to the map to add new locations and features as...

Portal Prison maps

March 22, 2021

I recently ran The Portal Prison adventure from the Game Master's Book of Random Encounters. The middle of this short adventure has five random encounters rolled up entirely from contents found elsewhere in the book. Here are some of the maps recreated using Inkarnate, which we used as battle maps in the mighty Owlbear Rodeo. Town Graveyard The Portal Prison The Portal Prison, ruined The...

The Fading Lands

March 10, 2021

After a successful run through Chult, Mezro, Omu, the Tomb of the Nine Gods AND a quick visit to the Feywild, our D&D group took a short break after over two years... and quickly decided to start a series of smaller campaign arcs in a new, undiscovered world: The Fading Lands. It seems that moving online near the end of the ToA campaign in spring 2020 hasn't slowed us down - in fact it's done...

Discovering LegendKeeper

January 1, 2021

A few months back I stumbled on LegendKeeper, an online tool for managing world building - maps, pins, wiki articles. More modern than other existing tools, with a less restrictive structure and a fantastic looking map system, it looked appealing so I dived in on a Patreon membership to join the closed beta. I started using it for our Tomb of Annihilation campaign, right at the end of it! I...

Cube props for the shrines of the Nine Gods

May 3, 2019

After about twenty-five sessions and a year of DMing Tomb of Annihilation, we have finally got to the city of Omu and the shrines of the Nine Trickster Gods. As a prop, I decided to make the cubes to hand out to the players as they progressed. First, find some old, unloved d6 dice (I used some cheap poker dice). Then, smother them in filling plaster to obscure any indented dots or designs and to...

Exploration in Tomb of Annihilation

October 8, 2018

I am currently running Tomb of Annihilation in a home-game of Dungeons & Dragons, 5th edition. After the party finally started their excursion into the jungles of Chult , I read up on the exploration and "hex crawl" rules, and did some Googling. Here's some useful things I found. In reading up and around the Tomb of Annihilation exploration rules, I found the following links useful:...

In Volo's Wake

March 6, 2017

In February I joined a fledging group of adventurers embarking on a journey into In Volo's Wake, the Adventurers League introductory adventure for Volo's Guide to Monsters at Tabletop Game Shop in Chester. In the group we have Delvar, a disillusioned Neverwinter city guard. Professor Galaf is an alchemical scholar, "on sabbatical" from his regular tutelage (although we don't know exactly...

Porked lightning

March 27, 2016

Here's a light-hearted game you can throw at your PCs to add a little respite and amusement to their next visit to “town”. It uses a game I remember from years ago as a kid, a game where instead of rolling dice you get to roll two plastic pigs: Pass the Pigs from Winning Moves (MB in my day!). In Pass the Pigs, "each turn involves one player throwing two model pigs... The player gains or...