Blood, Plunder and D&D

As the ethereal song of the merfolk washed over them, the companions clustered around the rails of the Lady Jezebel , to behold a thing of wonder. "I think that's the tip of a huge pyramid poking out of the sea" Ricmo marveled. "How?" "It was probably built when all this was dry land." Whisperleaf marveled. "The scholars and sages say that in the far past, millennia before the world had heard the name of Annwyn and its Empire, the seas were much lower then they are today. This massive archipelago we call The Thousand Islands was mostly a single continent, that spanned from Gianthome to The Southern Reach. The sages call it  Lost Farbosheia ." Tello nodded agreement. "The climate was much colder in those days, more of the world's water was locked in ice at the poles. An artifact of the slow precession of the poles. Your great northern groves were fields of ice when this pyramid was built, Druid." Interestingly Freddy argued the...

Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition can be notoriously hard when it comes to balancing encounters. While not every fight has be a bare knuckle, near death experience, when it comes time to design a difficult combat it can be hard to get things right, especially as levels increase. Many DM's find the party unexpectedly trouncing their Big Bad epic, end of story arc boss fight in two rounds without breaking a sweat. Or being completely overmastered as the DM desperately fudges to keep them alive. Both are  unsatisfying experiences. The CR system that 5e provides is at best a rough guide and at worst a completely false sense of security that will utterly betray you.  So how should you balance one of these ultimate encounters? The Goals of having a combat First, figure out the type of fight you are designing. Combat can serve many purposes, but it is almost always about eliciting an emotional responses in the parts of the players. The most common emotional arc is feelings of tension ...

  Ricmo crouched in the shadows and fog at the base of the Duke's Tower . The stone tower was large, old, and poorly maintained, all crumbling masonry and rotting mortar.  Ricmo could hear the faint pounding of surf, coming from far below him, where the cliffs the tower was built on met the sea. The wind howled.  Looking east, he should be able to see the entire harbor and town of  Puerto Lejos  spread out below him. If it wasn't for the fog pouring down from the heights. Instead all he could see was fog, and the barest outlines of the tips of the taller building as they occasionally wafted in and out of existence above the blanket of white.  He could certainty HEAR the town though. The inhabitants had just been unexpectedly delivered from the threat of invasion, and they were in the mood to celebrate. Earlier, when Ricmo had quietly taken his leave, he had left pretty much the entire town congregated in the main square, partying like there was no tomo...