Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Page 2 of 5)

Tim Bannock writes lots of house rules, advice articles, and gathers useful links from all over the web to help you improve your Dungeons & Dragons gaming sessions!

Treasures Just Beyond Character Sheet
Treasures Just Beyond Character Sheet

Enter The Nerdom Plays D&D: Treasures Just Beyond Character Sheets

06/12/2023 / / 0 Comments

The continuing adventures of the Enter The Nerdom crew should be posted to your favorite podcast listening service soon! In celebration, here are some character sheets I created for these sessions.

These character sheets are perfect for Knave and most of its hacks, and can probably do in a pinch for any ability score-based D&D retroclone or remix. The particular hack we are using is my current playtest draft of a Knave hack I call Treasures Just Beyond. It adds very basic dungeon and wilderness procedures, provides a slightly more robust social mechanic based on reaction rolls and attitude, and modifies the magic system to mix in elements of the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons and GLOG (perhaps better explained and shown in the Cairn SRD “GLOG Magic Hack“). Don’t worry, I’ll be posting that entire playtest document very soon!

Without further ado, here are the character sheets for Treasures Just Beyond (Enter The Nerdom Variant):

Player Character sheet

NPC Hireling sheet

Editable version of both via Google Slides. You’ll need to click File > Make a Copy and save it to your Drive somewhere, then you can edit it.

Enjoy!

Funnel Character Sheet

Using Simple DND to Create a Knave-based Funnel Character Sheet

12/06/2022 / / 0 Comments

A friend of mine reached out about doing a one-shot “training scenario” style introduction to Dungeons & Dragons for a small group, and I hit on the idea of using Portal Under the Stars, one of the most popular funnel-style adventures for Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. Ever the tinkerer – and looking to get my money and time’s worth from a bunch of Knave purchases and hacking – I decided I’d convert Portal to Knave, further simplifying the player-facing side of things. Don’t get me wrong, I love DCC RPG! But it’s got a few (albeit minor) barriers to entry that seemed worth removing for this exercise.

The conversion work has been a breeze – I could probably do it on the fly, but I suspect I’ll re-use this setup again and again – but I wanted to make certain I had a cool character sheet to go with it. There’s a ton of great hand-drawn ones out there, even by the likes of map-maker extraordinaire Dyson, but when I stumbled upon Simple DND, I knew I was just a 5-minute Photoshop job away from perfection.

So here you go: my Knave-based funnel-optimized character sheet, tweaked only slightly from Simple DND‘s Mini Character Sheet (usage license here). You can fit four characters on here, you’ve got 20 inventory slots, and I tailored it to include Ancestry and Occupation sections. This could easily serve as an NPC or monster tracking sheet in just about any version of D&D: just use the inventory slots as a notes section! Similarly, you could use it to track familiars, pets, or hirelings in everything from OD&D up through 5th Edition.

Funnel Character Sheet snip

Funnel Character Sheet – Click to Download

Let me know how you use it at your gaming table in the comments!

Using 5E Backgrounds in Knave
Using 5E Backgrounds in Knave

Knave: Using 5E Backgrounds to Determine Starting Gear

01/12/2022 / / 0 Comments

Since the launch of Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, one of the features I’ve enjoyed the most is Backgrounds. These archetypes are a fun and simple way of differentiating characters outside of the mechanical rigor of classes and lineages, and they tie characters to the game world. They might tell us what your character’s occupation was before embarking on a life of adventure, or tell us where they are from or how they were raised.

Knave is a beautiful, elegant OSR system that is getting a 2nd Edition over on the Questing Beast Patreon. One of the things I’ve been tinkering with is adding 5E Backgrounds to Knave. Doing so provides two interesting facets that can change up how character creation works and how the game plays out:

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blank inventory sheet
blank inventory sheet

Try This Inventory Slot System for Dungeons & Dragons Today

09/17/2021 / / 0 Comments

It’s been a long time since I posted anything to this website, but if you follow me on social I’ve been tied up with two things (gaming related, anyway): creating a customized version of the FASERIP system by way of the OGL, used in the MCU-inspired actual play podcast Let’s Start Over, Shall We?, and gearing up for a megadungeon crawling 5th edition D&D campaign with some old friends to introduce (at least one of) their children to roleplaying games!

It’s that second one that influences today’s post. I’ll be providing a fully detailed — but not yet playtested — inventory slot management system for adventurers. It also takes into account porters/quartermasters, draft animals, and towed storage like wagons and carts. It’s based on 5th Edition for some numbers (like a draft horse’s Strength score, for example), but can be pretty easily ported to any D&D-adjacent or OSR game.

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Seas of Vodari plus LMoP and DoIP
Seas of Vodari plus LMoP and DoIP

Lost Mine of Phandelver and Dragon of Icespire Peak in the Seas of Vodari

08/26/2020 / / 0 Comments

Last time I started a project on Greyhawk adaptations of the adventures Lost Mine of Phandelver and Dragon of Icespire Peak from the D&D Starter Set and D&D Essentials Kit, respectively. I mentioned some Greyhawk factions that I’ll post (actually re-post from my old site neuronphaser.com), but that’ll have to wait a hot second. You see, the day after writing the Greyhawk article, I got my hard copy version of Tribality Publishing’s campaign setting and rules expansion The Seas of Vodari (<– affiliate linky, if you wanna help support articles like this).

If you haven’t heard of it or checked out, hit that link above (even if you don’t want to buy it) and check the preview. It’s an awesome seafaring campaign setting made up of a post apocalyptic world of island nations, at the center of which is a raging magical storm. From a setting perspective, it’s got a lot of great ideas and tools for being a lot more inclusive than classic D&D settings (i.e. LGBTQIA representation; diverse artwork; not all orcs and drow are evil), and it doesn’t go grimdark with the post apocalypse side of things. From a rules perspective, there’s a huge amount of supplementary material on firearms, cannons, boats of all shapes and sizes, and loads of new class options, monsters, and magic items. Oh, if that’s not enough of a sell, there’s a 26 page free preview, too.

So what’s that got to do with LMoP and DoIP? Well, here’s a map and a few ideas on porting those adventures to The Seas of Vodari! Read on!

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