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!
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.
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
Labeled map with light grid:
The Western Frontier hex map (light grid)
Unlabeled map with light 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!
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!
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.
This article originally appeared on 10/13/2017 @neuronphaser.com. I’m reposting it here inspired by two articles on D&D Beyond by James Haeck: Strahd Must Die Tonight! and Strahd Must Die Again (And Again And Again). Both articles offer fantastic insights complementary to (and greatly improving upon) some of of the same ideas in what I wrote, below.
The idea of boiling down the iconic adventure Curse of Strahd is one that isn’t exactly promising for a few reasons: Strahd works best when he shows up several times, there’s a lot of backstory conveyed through locations and NPCs in Barovia, and there’s several artifacts spread out across the realm that even the odds against Strahd and present their own sidequests. Castle Ravenloft itself is a big place, with hundreds of areas to explore.
But Strahd’s been around for decades, so literally thousands of players have already played through some edition’s version of the adventure surrounding Ravenloft’s key adversary, or they’ve read about his exploits and power-level. The iconic status that makes him the perfect enemy for a party is also what makes him so cool for players to challenge head-to-head over and over again. In fact, that’s a key element of the campaign: Strahd, as a Dark Lord of a domain in Ravenloft, may have no way of being permanently defeated, and so he will play out his torturous, unrequited love story for all of time.
For Halloween, I’ve attempted to boil down Curse of Strahd to its barest elements, and I think I’ve created something that can be finished in 4-6 hours of play while still revealing the story of Strahd. Let’s see what you think!
This whole thing assumes you’re familiar with Curse of Strahd.
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