Blood, Plunder and D&D

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 ...

“Oh the door been misbehaving again has it? Aye it does that occasionally. Got a will o it’s own that door.” BlackJack Macafetty  greeted them from behind his bar, polishing one of his many mugs, the motion completely ingrained and on autopilot from years of repetition. He appeared almost exactly as they had left him, three months ago when the Lady Jezebel had sailed from the great metropolis of Haven Town and into the wilds of the Northern Reach. “So you lot aren’t actually back in Haven Towne at all then?” “No?” Dakhir replied bemusedly. “We’re at least a thousand leagues away in a town called Puerto Lejos . Or at least I think we are?”. BlackJack looked blank at the name of the town. “Not familiar with Puerto Lejos, so must be quite a ways away.” “Far into the Northern Reach. We were just walking down the Main Street and we saw the door to this Inn. How is that possible?” Dakhir asked. BlackJack shrugged.  “Magic. Black Alice’s magic. Or at least my da said it all started...

  Dungeons and Dragons and Pirates! What could possibly go better together? It's like peanut butter and chocolate right? Well, as scores of failed supplements have shown, it's actually a trickier mashup then you would think. While the spirit and style of the pirating in the age of sail is a natural and additive match to Dungeons and Dragons genre, there are a number of complications that can easily wreck or divert such a campaign. Unless you as a dungeon master are aware and proactive in your world building and scenario generation, you are likely to miss the mark of your expectations. The purpose of this series of three posts is to share some of the learning from running such a campaign (now entering it's second year of continuous play) and provide a basic storytelling framework and toolkit for navigating the choices and trade offs presented.  First I will decompose what a pirate adventure IS into its core themes, what kind of gaming style and campaign world best suits it, ...

  My intention was to run a pirate ghost story but not your standard Flying Dutchmen ghost story. How I got there was a bit convoluted , while doing the world building research for the D&D Pirate campaign, I read a lot of books on the 17th century Caribbean and one of the stories that particularly caught my attention was the 1692 earthquake that destroyed Port Royal, one of the principle ports of the region. The first hand accounts were chilling and epic, and all I kept thinking was "can you imagine the ghosts all that must have created? And thus the seed was planted. It also seemed like a great way to start to introduce some of the Shadowlands concepts that I was homebrewing, in addition to some of the backstory for the long dead Empire of Annwyn, both subjects that were going to play a major role in the campaign.  And so the former Imperial port of Lost Anchorage was born. Cold, desolate, remote and abandoned, well off the major shipping lanes, a haven of last resort for...