This stupid joke made me frustrated with how bad at drawing I am.
The other day I was playing a brilliant gnomish ranger. He shoot, he protec, he attac. But then some complete dorks said that a gnome can’t use a longbow. This is outrageous and the community should rally behind cause to get the Shortlongbow into more games. The tall people have had their fun and games for too long. It’s our time now. #gnomelivesmatter
Proficiency with a longbow allows you to add your proficiency bonus to the attack roll for any attack you make with it.
This bow has been under development by gnomes for millennia, but has only now come to fruition. Availability is still limited, but your local gnomish trading outpost may well have one.
Hodekin are a kind of kobold with more feline features. They share a good many traits though; they want their own hoard and they’re quite happy to find a Big Bad to serve. (This might not actually be what they were back in the days of legendary hodekin, but in this adventure, they are.)
Here’s an adventure I’ve placed them in, where you’ll find them locked away from the world and enslaved by a young, green dragon. He’s spent years splitting them into tribes to hate each other, giving them little time to realise who the real villain is. Will your players make it their aim to just steal a little treasure, or be the liberators of the Hodekin?
There’s only a couple of intended combats in this adventure – one of them being the Big Bad. I was hoping to make more of a social challenge adventure. There’s a number of factions to unite, who have no intent of doing so. And shouldn’t even really be talking to your players.
Hit the image to get the adventure!
This is an adventure that I started writing before I’d done my literature review. So, if I were going to write it again I’d do quite a lot different.
It’s very wordy. Where I’ve offered descriptions of environments they should be short and left to the DM, but I’ve filled in quite a lot of that for them. I was reading Dragon+ magazine, and they were talking about the first adventures written by the British arm of TSR; they came with a “warning” from the publisher that the adventures are more “flowery” than you’d expect to find in American adventures. It’s good to know, at least, that I’m not bucking a trend here.
This is a play test version of the adventure because I’ve not run it myself yet. I don’t have a group I can test things on, at the moment. (To my huge heartbreak!) The layout could be standardised more, with monster boxes just being text, and only using a single column. Plus, the map giving of the water caverns is straight up a Dyson Logos map that I’ve not yet tweaked to be underwater.
The other map in the adventure is handdrawn and photographed by me – on my phone! Not even scanned. So, this is very much an early stages production.
A friend of mine, we shall call him Man Without Blog Who Should Have A Blog, pointed me towards the Harry Clarke project. I think it’s a brilliant idea to take public domain art and turn it into something new. (There’s a very good discussion to be had about respecting the author wishes, but maybe 70 years after his death is enough respect to give someone.)
My writing is not nearly weird enough to fit into the typical OSR community; I write content fifth edition, and Forgotten Realms is usually where my headspace is. So, my contribution isn’t as cool as dreamfesters and mobs who dance so beautifully it perminantly enraptures those who see it.
Nonetheless, here’s a location I’ve written for this new Harry Clarke world, The Tender Hold. An asylum of sorts or rehabilitation centre. Click here or on the image for the PDF.
I’d like to write adventures. I’d quite like to write good adventures. So I decided to take a look through six low level, mostly short adventures and see what they do differently from each other. What techniques are used, and what information is expected from an adventure.
I feel like I’ve learnt a few things; that dungeon crawls are par for the course, that read aloud boxes aren’t for describing an area, and that art in the book isn’t the highest priority.
I’ll likely be following up with some blog posts adding in less dispassionate points of view on a lot of what I discovered during the review. Until then, feel free to have a read and let me know your thoughts.
Every time I’ve seen a surprise round happen, the rule has
been different with every DM. The entire rule, including fluff, is around 150
words. Maybe I can try and explain the RAW rule in a few bullet points.
Surprise happens when the at least one member of
the fight is being sneaky.
Foreach person being sneaky, compare their Stealth with the Passive Perception of each opponent.
Any opponent which fails the contest at least once
is surprised.
Surprised means you can’t move, take an action
(including bonus actions), or use a reaction.
They do still have a turn; any “at the start of
your turn” and similar triggers still happen.
(Hey, only 72 words!)
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it played like that.
If I recall properly, in the game I play in most weeks, if
we have surprise, we basically get a free round. This works in my head just
fine: we all get to do something really quickly before they even notice what’s
hit them. I believe we also typically get advantage on attacks, which may come
from being Hidden.
Ultimately, I think most ways I’ve seen fulfil the purpose
of what Surprise was intended to do: reward players for being smart in combat.
Whilst running head first, swords blazing, is always an option, it leads to
combat becoming stale. So long as there’s a reward for changing up combat
somehow, I’m down for it!
Hiding isn’t the only way to kick start a fight in your
advantage though. The rule ignores scenarios where the characters burst into
combat mid-conversation. In this case, my group’s house rule makes a lot more
sense.
Alternatively, maybe just swapping out the Passive Perception
check for a Dexterity save or contested Sleight of Hand. (The downside here is
that now the DM has to roll for all the NPC’s they’re running. Could Passive Dexterity (Sleight of Hand) be a
thing?)
