Using Paper Miniatures

I've been having lots of fun with paper monsters recently.

A selection of Kobold Press's Tome of Beasts Pawns

New Buds

Two new players joined our group at the last session. This is a photo one of them took, and also a picture of a dragon that was awesomely painted by one of our talented players. They ran from the dragon. it was the right thing to do. Recap of that to come.

Some Sleekfront Fun Facts

Sleekfront is one of the few cities in the northern lands that have been around for a long time. Despite its high walls, parts of the sprawling city have been smashed and rebuilt after demolition by floods, earthquakes, marauding dragons, and the occasional accidental dimensional rift. For this reason, much of the city is built on and around layers of the past. Much is more than what it seems, and around each corner often lies an uncanny juxtaposition. These things seem to make it popular with the adventuring sort.

Recap 7 - discovering some things about dwarves, murdering your way to safety

Greetings Adventurererers,

When the dust settled after the defeat of Nerganu, it was decided to peek around, and see if he had any good shit just laying about. He did not. Because he was a spectral ghost monster with no real need for fancy possessions. But, it did turn out that his phylactery cave was situated right near an interesting place in the mining system.

Recaps session 5&6 - Ain't no party like a lizard party, cuz a lizard party encourages cannibalism! Also magic deer and how to kill a kraken and it's ghost dad.

Having defeated the Catholic cultists inhabiting the long-neglected temple, the ragtag band of adventurers found themselves the toast of the Lizardmen village. Sylvan had to relay this fact to the battle-weary party, of course, being the only one who could interpret their language and figure out why dozens of Lizardfolk warriors were all jumping up and down and waving their spears in the air. Thank Gaia he was there, right, because… wow… that could have gone a lot differently. Everyone was invited to a Lizard Party! But first, they had to play bad guard/worse guard with their new prisoner, Celestor.

Recap 4 - Yog-Orcoth Makes his appearance, and we find out what a Nerganu is.

At the close of our previous session, our adventurers were feeling preeeeety tuckered out after slaying a van-sized undead dragon and clearing out most of the cult of Catholic wizards that had dug up and reanimated its corpse. They had also been fiddling with the stuff they’d found laying around the dungeon. What was that stuff, you ask? Oh intrepid reader you have foreseen what I was about to describe! As though in a crystal ball, even.

Recap 3 - to slay a wee dragon

Our adventurers looked up from having slain a gibbering mouther, and decided they definitely had not had enough, and needed to kill a bunch of shit right away. So that’s what they proceeded to do.

Also they kill a dragon thing. It's not this one, but in other news I did acquire this broken miniature, so I've got that going for me. 

Recap 2, Group Photo

Did I mention that one of my players is an incredible artist? Over the course of a few sessions, he hand-drew all the characters!

In this session, they are joined by another adventurer, who plays a dragonborn fighter. That rounds out the party as a high elf Great Old One Warlock, half-elf Circle of the Land Druid, half-orc Totem Barbarian, wood elf Thief Rogue, and copper dragonborn Battlemaster Fighter. Since everyone else has darkvision, I just decided that it was a recessive racial trait that the dragonborn managed to inherit, too.
In this session, they try to track down some missing townsfolk, and end up in some serious doo-doo. Also, they decided about halfway through to just start calling this cult "Catholics." I ran with it.

Homebrew Campaign Recap 1

I have been running a homebrew DnD campaign for about a year now. The players are, with one exception, guys I would never have expected to be into the game, and they are loving it. It's my first time DMing, and actually my first time playing Dungeons and Dragons (though I do play as a character in a different Dungeon World game)--so there are loads of pretty standardized encounters and settings as I moved along the learning curve for making things more intricate/exciting. I've also been making some custom monsters, with various degrees of success. It's been loads of fun.

As part of my game, I've been doing extended session recaps, since it is often a month or more between our marathon, 4-8 hour sessions. Here's a recap of our first session. I tried to get them to go to a tavern in a "Bog Standard" town. Most of them went to another thavern I had to make up on the spot. Etc.

Grave Magic continued

I thought this might be another interesting effect for a grave mage. Here's a stat block for one of these guys.

Grave magic: Mind Leak

Grave Magic

There are some spells which have been developed by the spirits of mages who refused to pass on into the afterlife. Instead, these ghostly mages continue their lives in the ethereal plane much as they had lived in their everyday life-perfecting rituals, tweaking the right combinations of spell components, and designing invocations for maximum effect.

Brewing Massively Hopped IPA

I work at a homebrew supply store, and one of the perks of this job is that occasionally some of the local craft breweries' brewmasters will drop in. The guys from Other Half, an incredible NYC brewery, occasionally come in to distract us from our work with their delicious beer, and I pick their brains about how they make it.

Wizard Pigeons

My dungeons and dragons players were recently faced with a situation where they wanted to get a message really far really fast. They wanted to know if they could "send a raven, or something," referring to the raven-based communication system that the Maesters use in Game of Thrones. I figure such a thing exists, but I was inspired by some groovy posts on Goblin Punch to make up a more fantastical version for wizard express mail. (In other news, that site is full of incredible stuff and is my inspiration for doing this blog in general). This is what I came up with.

HI!

This is a place where I intend to dump things like: roleplaying game ideas from/for my home D&D game, homebrewed beer stuff, and the heavy metal and art inspirations for both.

Here's a first recommendation: Listen to Immortal Bird because they totally rule.