Well, I finally did it, I created my own fantasy heartbreaker, set in my Dungeon Age world of Harth, and it’s called… Harthbreaker. What is it? Harthbreaker is my homebrew system. It’s what I use to play games with my friends (and my kids). I’ve been using and refining it for a couple of years […]
Introduction I recently read a blog post by Patrick Stuart about how a classic D&D monster, the owlbear, doesn’t seem to embody any of the cool traits of either owls (silent fliers with super senses) or bears (honey-loving tree climbers). He goes on to reinvent the owlbear for his own game. But this inspired me […]
Introduction I like mushrooms. They look cool, and have cool names like Destroying Angel, and are part of a completely unique Kingdom of lifeforms. I like that there is a giant mushroom under Eastern Oregon that is 8,000 years old and weighs 35,000 tons and is totally not a cosmic horror monster. Probably. So of […]
I had an opportunity to run a quick one-shot for some friends using my homebrew RPG system. It’s a little like Dungeon World, World of Dungeons, Blades in the Dark, etc. Level-less, class-less, roll 1d6 to resolve an action. Low hit points, no combat initiative. And we ran it in one of the new mini-dungeons […]
I’m running a Fifth Edition campaign (see “Nemesis Queens”), and we are having a lot of fun. But as the DM, I am struggling more and more to run combat. The players are all level 6 now, so they have extra attacks, and powerful spells, and a trunk full of magic items. And the big […]
Introduction Ever since first reading Dune (long, long ago), one of my favorite fantasy settings has been the desert. It’s a hostile landscape that can physically shift beneath your feet, while also hiding life-saving oases or lost cities or giant burrowing worms. When I first created the Dungeon Age world of Harth, I started in […]
Lately I seem to waffle between wanting to play really vanilla race/class combos (hello, human fighter!) and the most unconventional things I can imagine. I’m hung up on ideas about undead player characters right now, mostly inspired from too much vampire media (thanks, What We Do In The Shadows). But this is not a post […]
So, I know that everyone and their sister has homebrewed up their own Alchemist class for 5e by now, because we went so long without an official one, and lots of folks don’t love the official one. Including me. So, here’s mine. This “Formulaic Alchemist” has no sub-classes, it’s just the one build, and it […]
I really like rangers, in theory. But like many folks, I have found the published ranger designs for 5e to be a bit… off? Some say weak or unbalanced, some say ineffective or irrelevant to actual campaign styles. Whatever it is, it bugged me enough to take a swing at designing a class that might […]
I just re-watched the Castlevania animated series (which I enjoyed on many levels, yet again), and one of the characters that resonated with me this time was Hector. He is a human “forge-master” who creates undead monsters to fight for Dracula, but his character hook is that he is appalled by suffering. He may be […]