Recent content by timbannock

Tactical 5E is just PHB, Kobold Press' Tome of Heroes, some of the mods in the DMG, and Flee Mortals as your primary monster book. Forge of Foes and The Monsters Know will be your other resources for encounter design, but I think the above books would be your full library.

Agree with all of this, but mostly just wanted to reply in order to say how shocked I am with how little they were working with! A team of 35 to get that degree of quality is absolutely insane. Even a mid-tier SFX-heavy American movie has easily over 3x that many people on slightly fewer total...

Exactly this. Some of the most consistently good, nuanced and believable acting I've seen has been in short-form horror movies over on YouTube and Shudder by people with like 75 credits that are all "Guy In Convenience Store #3". On top of that, there are plenty of name actors that will...

Along those lines, even if it's not your bag I strongly recommend looking at Shadowdark and The Monster Overhaul. Both are very different, but one thing both do better than most products is give you so many useful resources for building stuff very quickly and/or on the fly. My preferred game is...

Life is tough and it's short, so do what brings you joy. Learning to be more firm about various aspects, not playing certain games even if it means playing with different players or self-exclusion of people you like, playing in less-than-ideal venues (loud stores or looking at a VTT on your...

Thanks for checking, but nope! The animal-people and animal-mounts were all a bit more alien and not easily identifiable as to what animal they were exactly a version of. It was weird and bordering on grimdark, but not quite grimdark.

Going in a completely different direction, if you want the "social stuff" but without the "bean-counting stuff" I highly recommend looking for a system that is very lightweight. Maybe not "as lightweight as possible" but perhaps very close. The reason is that the impact these sorts of things...

I've been searching for days since I saw this thread and haven't found it because I can't remember the name, so I'll post here and hopefully someone will swoop and save me from continuing to rack my brain. There are tons of artists that release art books of world-building, so that's a great...

I only recently ever got a look at those books because I was thinking of shoehorning them into a Seas of Vodari campaign I was running; I was basically adding any island-set D&D adventure that I could find into it. And I gotta say that while I ultimately passed on them for a variety of reasons...

Just a wild guess here, but I suspect some of this is due to "cool factor." I think the folks in charge of D&D want to push out stuff that is extremely, visually part of the "D&D brand" and that doesn't really get a lot of love elsewhere. Both Spelljammer and Planescape got these special sort of...

I would if I played it.

So much this! If they spent that space on dungeon, wilderness, and settlement generators in the vein of Shadowdark and other books that do it concisely, and actually threw the weight of their design team (and the cash they have for art, diagrams, etc.) into it, that would be something.

Whoa, my name is in the news! I'm obviously biased, but I just want to say that I'm really excited for what Bear and his team are doing with Heroic. All of the stuff I dreamed of for Astonishing but didn't have the time and resources to do, they are doing, and in many cases, a bunch of other...

Obviously "it's bad" is subjective, but I think you miss why people think "it's good": Greyhawk is a setting where most of the nations are locked in a cold war, and several are locked in a hot one. Armies are constantly clashing, domains are constantly up for grabs. Evil with a capital "E" is...

Since Mike Shea loves Shadowdark so much, I wonder if we'll ever see a "Forge of Foes but Shadowdark" from him? He's already built online tools for FoF accessible via his Patreon, so it seems like it'd be a somewhat easy (maybe somewhat tedious, too, though) exercise to reapply it to Shadowdark.