If you missed out on my new Dungeons & Dragons mini-adventure “Head Games” or just want the adventure presented in a simplified format, this one’s for you! Morrus of the RPG news site EN World has given the adventure a one-page treatment that presents all the information you need to know on a single sheet of paper.
You can check out “Head Games” as a one-page adventure here on EN World. If you want more quick D&D adventures, you can support Morrus’ Patreon by clicking here.
A rampaging orc and a halfling who’s in way over her head are just the beginning in “Head Games,” a new mini-adventure for Dungeons & Dragons! The heroes find themselves in a small town where a certain halfling has been too trigger-happy with her enchantment spells, leading to big trouble for the locals.
“Head Games” is part of the EN5ider Patreon, which provides high-quality material compatible with Dungeons & Dragons on a weekly basis. For $1, you can enjoy this mini-adventure and over 200 other articles!
Every Dungeons & Dragons game needs monsters, and the Creature Codex provides more than 400 new fiends and foes for your fantasy RPG experience.
The designers of the Creature Codex, Kobold Press, have a strong reputation for quality, imaginative products, which is why the Kickstarter for the book exceeded its funding goal by more than $200,000. If you didn’t participate in the Kickstarter, you can still order the book in print and PDF at KoboldPress.com and DriveThruRPG.com.
Why am I plugging this product (other than the fact that I love a good monster book)? Because it features my first publication for D&D 5th edition. My creature, the Corpse Thief, appears on page 66.
While I’m partial to my own creation, there are a ridiculous number of other creatures, both menacing and weird, that make a great addition to any D&D-style RPG. Some of my other favorites include the Light Dragon, the Keg Golem, and the Kitsune.
Bottom line: check out the Creature Codex now!
Parts of the Pathfinder Playtest seem like a jarring change to the system to me. That’s mostly because I spent 10 years running a game that used very few rules beyond the Core Rulebook or the Beginner Box. The major change to the action economy and the removal of old multiclassing, for example, feels weird.
That said, I did stay on top of new rules releases as part of my whole freelance writing thing, so I can see that many of these major changes still have Pathfinder DNA. If you’re wondering where all these changes came from, it mostly boils down to a decade of optional rules expansions.
Paizo Publishing released their first look at the next edition of Pathfinder last week, offering a free playtest rulebook that people can use to put the new system through its paces. Character customization remains a large part of Pathfinder’s appeal, but the process by which you create your hero has changed.
Has it changed for the better? That depends on what you want out of the Pathfinder RPG.
Dungeons & Dragons started as an offshoot of wargaming, but it grew quickly. TSR, the company that owned the game, soon saw that people wanted more than just dungeons and wilderness areas for their heroes to explore. They wanted a semblance of a living fantasy world filled with history, personalities, and adventure.
The earliest settings, which I described last time, grew at the speed of adventure – new information got added as needed for a given module rather than in an atlas-like book. By the 1980s, though, D&D was realizing its media crossover potential. This led to a new wave of campaign settings that had a reach far beyond gaming tables.
Dungeons & Dragons has never been about one single fantasy world. In fact, beginning in the 1980s, the game spawned a multiverse that stands on par with anything churned out in the comic book industry. Through the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition years especially, D&D became home to dozens of parallel fantasy worlds.
Role-playing games are filled with rules, sometimes spanning dozens of different books and supplements. However, most games lead off with some note in the preface that highlights the most important rule. This is Rule 0, and it’s usually there so everybody remembers to have fun. What Rule 0 is, though, varies from game to game and person to person.
Thanks to its roots in pulp fiction, the fantasy gaming genre goes very well with comic books. Sure, the mechanics and the fiction don’t always line up, and yes there are a fair share of duds out there. But overall, comics based on popular role-playing games is a consistent, if not high-profile, part of the industry.
There have been a lot of good fantasy RPG comics, from the fun albeit rough in quality Advanced Dungeons & Dragons series of the 1980s to 2016’s extremely fun Pathfinder: Worldscape, which mashed up the Pathfinder RPG with classic heroes such as Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, and Red Sonja. But my personal favorite RPG-based comic is the series that ran in the Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition days.
As a tabletop gamer from the early 1990s, it’s a little weird to me that the hobby is so mainstream these days. Most people know of Dungeons & Dragons or a similar game, and shows like Community celebrate the hobby. It wasn’t too long ago that playing D&D meant you were in league with Satan.
I’m serious – if you played a role-playing game in the 1980s or 1990s, your parents probably worried at some point or another that you were getting involved with Satanism. Just as heavy metal supposedly had satanic lyrics if you played the album backwards, D&D was believed by many to be a tool of the occult.
How did this get started? As with most cases of moral panic, it began with adults scrambling to explain senseless tragedies.
Charlie Brooks 