William Brandes Stoddard

LARP Design: Quest Shrines

Back in this post, I suggested quest shrines as active locations on game sites, where players could go to gain a minor quest with a reward. In this post, I’m getting a little deeper into the nuts and bo...

In Defense of Short Rest Resets

Over the past several years of 5e design, we’ve seen per-short-rest timing go away completely as a matter of new, official subclass design. This becomes much clearer in Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse, in which many non-core races have been updated to operate on more uses, but per-long-rest instea...

Anatomist Wizard

Anatomists come from a relatively recent branch within the School of Necromancy. They are dedicated to anatomy and all that they can do with superior knowledge of the body. Like other necromancers, they face intense suspicion from society if their practice becomes known. In the most enlightened kingdoms or republics, they mig...

Treasures of the Ruby Talon Deeps

With some brainstorming help from friends yesterday, I have a new idea for the Ruby Talon Deeps. The core credit for this idea goes to Geoffrey Fortier. A new treasure type, called remembrances, are consumable items that grant both an effect and a memory relating to the history of the Ruby Talon Deeps. They l...

Four New High-Level Necromancy Spells

Since DMSamuel and I just finished our conversation on 2e’s Complete Book of Necromancers in Edition Wars, I felt inspired to write some high-level necromancy spells. CBoN has several, though more than a few of them are so niche in effect that I’m not trying for direct translation. Might f*ck around and break out...

Ruby Talon Deeps: Locations 1

In a recent post, I drew a side-view map of the Ruby Talon Deeps dungeon, with essentially no other description. At the time it was just about enjoying drawing and getting something out of my head so that I could get to my paying work. Today I’m revisiting it to take a break between larger pieces of work on my plate. I’m ...

An Eleventh Year of Blogging

This yearly update is the closest this blog gets to personal rather than game content or commentary. Eleven years, and this is the blog's 496th published post. Not too bad - though I'm vain enough to be sad that my daily pageviews have dropped off by about 30%. Maybe someday I'll try posting some videos of gaming adv...

Hazards as Skill Challenges

I’m finally getting around to writing in detail about an idea I proposed over in Tribality, in my Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything breakdown. This is a mechanical framework for processes th...

Ruby Talon Deeps Map

Freelance adventure writing requires map-drawing, even when a real cartographer is going to come along and draw a much better map for the final release. (Thank God for real gaming cartographers.) Anyway, I drew this map for practice, to help me make cooler crappy first draft maps.

I've always loved side-view maps for du...

Vecna’s Spellbook

In conversation with Mystech, he suggested that mage hand was simply the only surviving spell among many mage [body part] cantrips. I went straight from there to “mage hand is an echo of the power of Vecna on Oerth,” so that implies the existence of a mage eye cantrip, a very scaled-dow...

Spellcasting and NPC Stat Blocks

With that rather… quotidian title, I’m launching into what promises to be the biggest midstream change in all of 5e. (We’re not really looking for something else to top this.) During the Future of D&D panel, they discussed the fact that NPC stat blocks are losing the big beefy spell lists that you see in, f...

September Spell Collection

To be honest, this post is a palate cleanse in the midst of a longer writing project. A friend of mine who suffers from polymorphous light eruption thought it sounded like a D&D s...

LARP Design: Healing in Hit Location Games

The post from a few weeks ago about new healing spells for D&D sparked a conversation about new healing approaches for LARPing. In this case, I’m mostly interested in the hit-location based LARPs that I’m playing – hit point games are fine if that’s your thing, but I’m not the best person to ask about t...

Villain’s Schemes: Influence

A little while back, I wrote about villainous schemes for immortality, working from the Villain’s Scheme table in Chapter 4 of the DMG. The point of this exercise is to think about the different tiers of play and how the higher tiers expand the scope and stakes. Especially if you don’t plan to continue into tiers 3 or 4, ...

Eight New Healing Spells

Stands-in-the-Fire started a conversation over in Twitter about healing gameplay styles. Now, he’s talking about a lot more than D&D 5e there, but there are enough great ideas floating around in the thread that I wante...

The “Pious” Warlock, Part Four

Oh hey, it’s been a really long time since I’ve touched this series. I’ve done a ton of Planescape reading, between Hellbound and Faces of Evil. There’s enough there that I haven’t really scratched that surface yet, but I’m plowing ahead. That’s the power of CHAOS, baby! Becaus...

D&D 5e: House Rules 2021

At the request from Tim Baker, and for the general convenience of my players, this is an update to the Aurikesh house rules. It’s been five years, and I’ve had time to see the effects of things in play.

Character Generation

4d6 drop lowest for one column. Roll 2d6 for a safety-net column. Pi...

Villain Schemes: Immortality

In a recent episode of Edition Wars, I got to talk to DM Samuel, Kainenchen, and Stands in the Fire about Chapter 4 of the 5e DMG. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about a very short chapter, which is a...

D&D 5e: Kaiju Battle as a Complex Trap

As you know if you’ve been following my work for long enough, I’ve spent a lot of time working on how to handle kaiju battles in D&D 5e. To spell that out a bit: I want something that uses the PCs’ combat abilities and mostly feels like a fight, but the enemy is beyond their ability to kill – their goal is to evad...

Revised Archfey Patron

I’ve got significant problems with the existing Archfey patron that I haven’t been shy about. This isn’t even my first effort at overhauling the Archfey! The short version of the issue is that Fey Presence as a one-round charm/fear just… isn’t much. Misty Escape is a great per-short-rest get-out-of-jail-free card. B...

Five New Cleric Spells

I’m hip deep in editing and development work, which means that occasionally my brain needs a break to create some new stuff. Even after XGTE, TCOE, and Seas of Vodari, the higher spell levels are fairly slim pickings for clerics, so that’s what I’m hoping to deal with a bit today – spells for clerics of 5th level and ...

Warden of the Ancients Fighter Archetype

Like a lot of what I'm posting these days, this is content for Under the Seas of Vodari, written by me with a lot of development support from Shawn Ellsworth. It deals heavily in the setting lore, a little more of which you can see in this pre...

More Aquatic Magic Items

Aquatic magic items? Still a stretch goal from the Under the Seas of Vodari Kickstarter that I need to knock out, and this is the blog where I do that. Check out all of the Seas of Vodari content here on Harbinger of Doom.

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2021-04-10 03:13:34 +0000 UTC View Post

Magic for Hunters & Explorers PDF

Shawn Ellsworth and I have polished up some of the spells and magic items I've written over the years into this new PDF, themed around hunters and explorers. Enjoy, and please do let us know what you'd like to see more of in the future!

PS. Not an April Fool's prank.

Level Up Your Background

I have a new product available on the DM's Guild! It is a 10-page PDF titled Level Up Your Background. Your free copy for being a Patreon backer is attached below, with my deep thanks for your continuing support.

Please remember that word-of-mouth is an incredibly powerful tool for promoting this work, ...

LARP Design: Five More Field Battle Models

Back in January, I wrote about five common field battle designs, and it sparked an interesting couple of days of conversation among my LARPing community. This time out, I’m talking about five much less 2021-03-23 18:53:59 +0000 UTC View Post