The RPG Study

S7: Herbalist's Ship A cramped working space, this tiny shop is tucked in a small alley off the main thoroughfare. The proprietor, an absolutely ancient halfling druid named Gilroy creates poultices and salves from his vast collection of dried herbs, flowers, roots and other preserved plant parts. The shop has almost no space to move for any creature larger than a halfling. This has become such a problem that Gilroy has begun doing business with larger creatures through the shop's front door. The current state of the neighborhood:

  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...

The Light of Xaryxis is a sprawling, exciting, adventure in the Spelljammer setting. An adventure for levels 5-8, the adventure is told in a series of short episodes requiring about 2-3 hours to play each. Each episode ends on a dramatic cliffhanger for the next episode to follow. What follows is an account of my groups experience with the first two episodes, and my thoughts on certain parts of the adventure: Chapter 1: Astral Rain The party is supposed to begin this adventure in a coastal city. I choose Neverwinter since our party consists of three characters from the world of Ravnica who have traveled the branches of Yggdrasil to arrive in the Forgotten Realms (a long story which perhaps I will recount another time). The other three characters are brand new to the campaign, though their players are not. Notably, one of the character is a giff from the Astral Adventurers Guide.  Neverwinter works just fine for this start. Right away we encountered one of the major criticisms leve...

Shameless plug time: My latest supplement for the DM's Guild is now live! Spelljamming Vessel Log  provides a vital resource for managing a spelljammer! This log  enables a party of space farers to easily and quickly reference all of the important details for their spelljamming vessel including ship stats like HP, AC, Speed, etc. as well as the specific details of the weapons mounted on their ship. There is a roster for crew members and cargo alike, as well, so all pertinent details of the ship are in easy reach. The supplement contains a full color single page (front and back) tracking sheet as well as a printer friendly black and white option. It also includes two example logs for the  Moondancer  and the  Second Wind  from the  Light of Xaryxis  adventure.

  Wow. That Wizards direct had some big drops. Now, I consider myself both a fan of Magic (I started playing with 4th Edition) and D&D, but the real meat of today's announcements for me was all on the D&D side. One D&D! Backwards compatibility! Virtual Table Top! Planescape! There was a lot to unpack and I will be taking the next several posts to parse what we observed. If you haven't seen it yet, check out the video: The biggest news is definitely the release of the One D&D playtest documents (available on D&D Beyond as we speak ), but if I'm being honest there was something else that got me super hyped. And it's not Planescape. It's the complete Phandelver campaign! I loved Lost Mine of Phandelver . It was one of the best adventures I've ever run, it was an incredible on boarding experience for 5E D&D for my 4E group. I have reread that adventure at least a dozen times. It is comfort food reading for me. It does such a good job of pres...

 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...