Recent content by timbannock

Seconding all of this. One great example is a lot of Caverns of Thracia (talk about going back to the founding and finding good examples!) where encounters are, by design, taking advantage of the map. There's an awesome one with a door to a refrigerator-room, there's fun hallway fights against...

Jokes aside, this is a great callout. I'm planning a D&D intro for my nephew since he sorta happened into a copy of the Starter Set and Essentials Kit, and am absolutely handling defeat in this way, as he doesn't handle serious violence well. My main changes are making all the villains markedly...

Obviously it's time for the old bird seed and dynamite trick.

It's absolutely geared toward that. If D&D is aimed at 12+, this is easily 8+. The setting info backed up by the mechanics is entirely themed around a very heroic, exploration focused Zelda style. You advance specifically by giving people hope and fighting off the "despair" in the form of...

I voted Monster Manual but frankly I view MM, MM2, and Fiend Folio as all equal parts of a whole. Interesting to see the DMG as #1; it's definitely got the most personality, for so many reasons!

While I can't deny it has a lot of internal referencing, it's only the "biggest play loops" that end up being difficult ecosystems to tweak. Example 1: I used the travel rules for Shadowdark in place of SD's original hex crawling rules. It worked great because Errant became ALL of those travel...

What does it have about airships?

Thanks for the info! You'll get a chance soon, most likely: I am indeed starting it up and will be blogging about it on my site (timbannock.com) eventually. After a fun but ultimately false start with Shadowdark (largely thanks to Sly Flourish, like you mentioned, as well as LichHouse on...

I actually just pulled the trigger on Magical Industrial Revolution and got the book a week ago. I was really questioning it for a long time because I wasn't sure how much I'd use such a hyper-specific city sourcebook...but man oh man was that dumb. Just like The Monster Overhaul, MIR had so...

They sold off their studio. That's very different from licensing IP.

All of this. Perhaps related: Based on my early formative experiences in RPGs, I wish "roll out in the open" and "don't hide information" had been principles that more of my GMs and Players followed/respected. I learned so many bad lessons that I carried for something like 20 years, and by...

IMHO, a Curse of Strahd series would be really neat. You've got the various vampire spawn that have all the classic vampire weaknesses, but then you have Strahd who's missing a few key ones. He can enter anywhere; He is the Land, so he's got an open invitation. Also he creates the day/night...

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love that sequence. But I also can't deny it was expensive as heck and wasn't the necessary means of moving the plot in the way that it did. A different scene with Themberchaud talking with them in this film would have been fine and probably a 10th of the price...

Repeating what others have said, but maybe with my own spin... Absolutely brutal editing. Whatever words the author things are brilliant, the editor should be ready to excise in the name of brevity and clarity. Ample cross-referencing: use page numbers often, even if it's ugly. But if you get a...

Yeah, all of that. The D&D movie was a victim of timing and over-budgeting. Strip out stuff like the Themberchaud sequence and you still get a dragon in the story in a much less expensive way (the one strafing the battlefield in the flashback). Strip out the many non-critical CGI inserts and you...