The RPG Study

 S17: The House of Monsters This small private residence is the home of the retired soldier, Drabus Folrin IV. The son of soldiers, he spent his entire life serving in the army of the king. After one campaign in the Great Northern Mountains, he discovered a secret that revealed a more insidious threat to his home. As he learned more about this threat he discovered that the house he now lives in sits above the entrance to where this horrible evil dwells. He purchased the house and moved in an attempt to safeguard the city by himself. Drabus’s accommodations are spartan, as he tries to leave as much open ground for him to fight the creatures that crawl out from the underground to threaten the city. He maintains a small cot and uses the fireplace to make himself meals. Otherwise the building is nearly completely empty, but burn marks and blood stains cover the floors, a testament to Drabus’s skill and commitment to his watch. Drabus is getting on in years though and worries he will n...

  S16: Guard Tower - Top floor The Roof of the Guard Tower is a fairly drab and pragmatic place. Looming high over the District, the guards stationed at the tower top have a commanding view of the neighborhood, the city, and even the sea Four large ballistae are mounted to the crenellations along the perimeter, one in each cardinal direction. They have a 120 degree firing arc, side-to-side and vertically as well, enabling them to shoot down at invaders or up at threats from above. Also located on the tower roof is a small shelter where messenger pigeons are kept. These pigeons are backups in case those in the cities central keep should be lost, and they have generally grown fairly fat and lazy. Lately, since the tenure of the new guard chef Tevan (See S15), birds that get too obese often end up as dinner in the mess one night. Guard initiates are then sent out to by new birds from the merchants in the city. The entire city up to this time:  

S15: Guard Tower - Second floor The second floor of the guard Tower contains the general bunk house for the guards on active duty, where they can take a rest on breaks during their shifts. New recruits are required to live in the Tower for three (3) months before being allowed to find or return to lodging elsewhere in the city. The second floor also contains a mess area. A rudimentary kitchen is constructed around the hearth and a few tables are present for the guards to eat their meals. The mess is run by greenhorn named Tevan. She is inexperienced as a guard but is an impeccable chef. Word has started to get out about her cooking and meal time is busier than its ever been in the mess. The third area of the second floor is a rudimentary armory. The Quartermaster is a positively ancient man named Wellesley Figgis. Wellesley has weathered it all, the Siege of the Remora, the dragon Ancalaxia, and the Rising Tide, and has gained the reputation for being unkillable. It could be due in par...

  S14: Guard Tower - Ground floor The seat of local law enforcement, this round tower is seen as either a bastion of order, or a reminder of oppression and inequity, depending on one's perspective. What is true in any case is that the tower is not only a defensive fortification to protect the city, but is also a barracks for the local guard detachment. This tower is under the command of a jovial individual named Relex Tiberus. They have been in command for the past 7 years and while they are known for having a great sense of humor, they are also known for their intensity. Many guards do their best to avoid Relex’s bad side. The ground floor is a mix of rooms. The front room near the door contains desks and tables for guards to interact with locals who come in with complaints or reporting crimes. The back of the tower contains cells for holding criminals and other prisoners. The cells currently have two occupants. A man named Yelush who hails from a far away city and was arrested b...

  S13: Borden's Folly Borden's Folly is the name of the trading cog currently docked inthe boat house. Owned and captained by one Filbus Borden, it was named in jest as Filbus won the ship in a game of dice in the seaport city of Rillin, but was unaware of it's age, or maintenance needs. He has since poured a small fortune into fixing it, but has nearly made back the expense trading fine silks up and down the coast. Though this sometimes makes him a target of pirates, he has successfully talked his way out of having his ship commandeered, just his cargo stolen. The ship itself is a mix of aged and new timbers. Filbus stays in a small cabin in the aft castle. The ships hold is small, this the reason Filbus trades in high values products. The ships first mate and 3 deck hands sleep in two separate cabins located off of the cargo hold. Unbeknownst to Filbus, the first mate Dreena Zentus has smuggled a powerful magical artifact aboard, hidden in one of the crates of silk. Sh...

 S12: Boat House A large boathouse sits atop the sea wall that marks the transition from the end of the city and the start of the Bay of Telfiras. The boathouse is large enough for two midsize sloops or trading cogs to dock, receive repairs, and load or unload goods. Currently only a single trading cog is docked here, the Borden's Folly. This vessel is an aging cog captained and owned by Filbus Borden (See S13 for more details). The rest of the boathouse is an organized mess of crates, barrels, ropes, anchors, and other equipment necessary for sailing. During the day the boathouse is a hive of activity with dockworkers, sailors, and porters running to and fro. At night is a deserted and calm place, except for when a local gang of wererats known as The Biters uses it as temporary crash pad for the night. Passersby on the streets have reported an incessant squeaking, at an unreasonable volume, coming from inside on rare nights.

  A New Year could very well mean time for a new Campaign! One of the newest adventures to come out for 5E D&D is the excellent Shadow of the Dragon Queen by Wizards of the Coast. Set in the magical realm of Krynn, this adventure is the first official product dealing with this storied setting. Whether you are starting a new game, or continuing one, the latest release from The RPG Study, Trinkets of Krynn provides you and your party with one hundred unique objects and trinkets that can be used in your campaign right away. These objects have been drawn from the text of the original first edition Dragonlance releases, from DL1 Dragons of Despair all the way through DL14 Dragons of Triumph , but no prior experience with any of these modules is required.  A few example trinkets include a small unicorn carved from valenwood trees, a perfectly round snowball that doesn't melt, and a quill from the library of Palanthus.  Check out  Trinkets of Krynn  on the DM's ...

S4: Private Residence This house is the home of the cobbler, Burna Selistan. She moved in approximately 3 months ago. She uses the main floor for cooking and eating, but also does some of her work here too, when she doesn't feel like traveling to her shop. The main room consists of a hearth, a large wooden table with round stools and a few comfortable upholstered chairs sit in the corners near the windows.  One set of stairs leads to the bedroom on the second floor and another leads down to the basement. A front door leads out to the main thoroughfare and a second door leads out back to the alley behind her house. The entire dungeon so far:

S3: Trevylin's Steelworks The neighborhood blacksmith, Trevylin’s Steelworks, is the best place to purchase and repair arms and armor. Trevylin’s quality of work is average at best, but his prices are possibly the lowest anywhere in the city. The shop itself is approximately 20 ft by 50 ft with a small 20 ft square add-on. The forge and anvil are the center pieces, the walls lined with finished goods. A small cabinet in the add-on contains a rolled by straw mattress. Trevylin sleeps in the shop at night, afraid someone will come steal his goods. The entire "dungeon" so far:

Dungeon23 - The 365 days of Crypt-mas... Like many others online, I have decided to participate in Dungeon23 originally dreamed up by Sean McCoy of Tuesday Knight Games , the company responsible for the award winning table top RPG, Mothership . The idea is simple enough, create one room of a dungeon each day, and at the end of the year you will have a 365 room mega-dungeon. To add some complexity, the rooms of the dungeon will be distributed into 12 levels or layers.   There has been a lot of buzz on Internet about this idea, even going so far as sparking the hashtag #Dungeon23 (a tag you will be seeing around here a lot!). Many of the interested dungeon designers are planning to use some kind of journal or gridded notebook to track the shapes of their rooms and the dungeon layout, as well as record the specific details of the room being generated. Other parts of the online discussion include alternate ideas for dungeon composition including letting some of the layers be wilde...

Rather than giving a play-by-play style recap or our second session, I would like to just give my impressions of the content from Ghosts of Saltmarsh (GoSM) that was used for this particular session, namely the Ruins of Warthalkeel. In Appendix A of GoSM, there is a series of three adventure locations set under the sea. Each location has a standard layout and inhabitants, but also contains four Adventures that be grafted on top of this location which interact with the default elements of the adventure locale. Each of these adventures is for a different party level and I must say, I love this approach, though it's not perfect. Of the three, only one of the adventure locations has a first level adventure and it also happens to be my favorite of the three locales: Warthalkeel. The setup I used was a bit modified from the hook provided in the book . The actual ruins themselves were great. My players had a good time exploring the wreckage of this doomed town. I set an actual timer of on...

In a delightful twist of fate, I have been asked by a group of players I didn't even know were an organized group to be their DM. I happily accepted, especially as the time constraints of the group fit quite nicely into my personal schedule. And of course, another game means another opportunity to try and play some of the voluminous D&D content I have acquired since I began DMing. I have wanted to play Ghosts of Saltmarsh for years now. I loved the concept of a campaign assembled from disparate adventures, it's typically how I build mine rather than following one long adventure path style campaign, but could never find a good way to integrate it into an ongoing game. The players in this new campaign are generally new to D&D, or returning to it after some time away. As such, the desire for a classic fantasy RPG was high. I decided an adventure in the grim world of Greyhawk would be just the thing. We have been using Discord to coordinate and organize our campaign and in ...

 Spelljammer: Adventures in Space just released and with it comes a whole host of new mechanics for the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Most notable of these is probably the titular spelljamming  which allows a spellcaster to control a space-faring vessel and control its movement. Ship-to-ship combat gets a good section explaining the mechanics of such combat and as far as I can tell it is similar to the ship rules in Ghosts of Saltmarsh, but as I was reading these rules, something jumped out at me that I thought could use some attention. When onboard a spelljamming craft, one player must necessarily be the  spelljammer for the vessel, guiding it through Wildspace and the Astral Sea. Other characters can man the variety of weapons that may be fixed to their ship, a vital task since operation of a single weapon requires multiple actions. The last required role onboard the ship is that of Captain. Now, you might think that someone designated as captain would have a...

I don’t know if it’s proper blog etiquette (if there even is blog etiquette) to have an “Introduction” post. Perhaps only the first few lucky readers, and those dedicated diehards who end up reading through dozens of posts, will ever actually find this post! But who cares! This website, The RPG Study, will be my attempt to catalog my thoughts and experiences regarding tabletop role playing games. I have been playing (and specifically Game Mastering) these games for about ten years now, and I’ve read a lot of different rules systems and adventures. But the problem is that I’ve played far less than I would like to. As a result, my head is always swimming with adventure hooks and campaign ideas. Encounters, monsters and character builds. With a full time job and a family, I know I’ll never get to use even half of the content that I wish I could. So it dawned on me, what if I share these ideas? What if I created a place where I could discuss these ideas, get them out of my own brain, and m...