Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Page 3 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!

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

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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Lost Mine of Phandelver and Dragon of Icespire Peak in Greyhawk

Since chances are high that I’ll be running a combined Lost Mine of Phandelver and Dragon of Icespire Peak campaign set in Greyhawk in the not-too-distant future, I figured I’d share some of my work. Which, of course, is built on the shoulders of giants. A Fifth of Greyhawk posted about this very same thing back in 2018, so I’ve borrowed from that, created player and DM hex maps, and made a few tweaks. Check it out below.

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Tales from Dalentown: Trueland Gazetteer Western Frontier Hex Maps

Want some different versions of the Western Frontier map from Tales from Dalentown: Trueland Gazetteer for 5th Edition? Here ya go!

These maps are great for building your own hexcrawl campaign. We’ve got labeled and unlabeled versions, and we’ve also provided the raw Worldographer (AKA ‘Hexographer II’) file for you to manipulate to your heart’s content. You can pick up Worldographer here from Inkwell Ideas.

Get all these maps and the Worldographer file from this Google Drive folder. Check out the maps below:

Labeled map:

The Western Frontier hex map

The Western Frontier hex map

Labeled map with light grid:

The Western Frontier hex map (light grid)

The Western Frontier hex map (light grid)

Unlabeled map with light grid:

The Western Frontier unlabeled hex map with grid

The Western Frontier unlabeled hex map with grid

Pick up Tales from Dalentown: Trueland Gazetteer for 5th Edition free or PWYW at DriveThruRPG or itch.io today!


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Happy gaming to ya!

Dungeons & Dragons Simple Question and Answer Experience Point XP System

Updated from an original article published Nov 19, 2018.

An easy way to stress the three pillars of play (combat, exploration, interaction) in Dungeons & Dragons is to award experience points in a different manner. Older editions awarded them based on gold piece values of treasure procured (or secured in town after selling off loot), and other games have tables you can reference that provide XP values for different tasks performed, goals achieved, and so on. Unearthed Arcana addressed this with the Three-Pillar Experience system, a set of variant rules that intersects with the Challenge rating system and the different tiers of play: first tier (levels 1–4), second tier (levels 5–10), third tier (levels 11–16), and fourth tier (levels 17–20).

Here’s a simple system that uses a series of questions and answers to award experience. Based on the questions you use — the lists presented below, or something of your own devising — you can easily tweak the system to stress different types of conduct during play, and thus stress the pillars of play in different ways.

Read on!

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Random Party Bonds for Dungeons & Dragons

Updated from an article originally published Nov 20, 2018.

Player characters receive bonds from their chosen Background, descriptive traits that tie them to the campaign setting via some sort of relationship to people, places, or things. An alternative method of using bonds is to more directly create ties between the individual player characters themselves, creating relationships that help them forge a team identity and a reason for sticking together through whatever adversity they face in their adventures together. Here are some additional ideas for bonds.

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