If you need some weirdos for your PCs to meet while| Brandes Stoddard
For another project, I’m working on research mechanics, and| Brandes Stoddard
The use of hirelings isn’t nearly as common in D&D as it once was, but I think we should bring that back a bit. In addition to shoring up a party’s weakness and draining some cash out of their coffers, hirelings also provide someone who can die horribly to showcase […]| www.brandesstoddard.com
The use of hirelings isn’t nearly as common in D&D as it once was, but I think we should bring that back a bit. In addition to shoring up a party’s weakness and draining some cash out of their coffers, hirelings also provide someone who can die horribly to showcase a monster’s sick dance moves. Oh, and they make great backup characters for when a dragon eats the one guy in the party who can Raise Dead and you’re a week away from anyone else who could.| Brandes Stoddard
What follows is a microgame that I wrote for Dancing Stickman’s LAARG project on Bluesky (which is why the text refers to posting your playthrough on Bluesky). I don’t work in the microgame space, um, ever, but I enjoyed writing this, and I hope you’ll enjoy it too. You can also read a more visually […]| Brandes Stoddard
We ran a one-day event for Citadel LARP this past weekend (19 July), and we put our second puzzle box design into play this time. Serella Savenko helped me with every step of planning and building this one. I want to thank Elena Simon for providing the box itself, and Laurie Zolkosky for driving back to Atlanta to get the damn box because I… left it on my living room floor. Also, GFo and Ross playtested the puzzle box for me, which I appreciated immensely.| Brandes Stoddard
Int-based class.| Brandes Stoddard
I haven’t written an UA breakdown in a hot minute—the last one was before the three core books of 2024-25 dropped!—but this drop sucked me back in. Part of this is to find out where the reading audience is these days. I’m sad to see that they’ve dropped bylines for UA articles; I liked knowing […]| Brandes Stoddard
So I’m a huge fan of games like The Room and Boxes, and I really wanted to bring some of that experience to Citadel LARP. Let’s set aside for a second the fact that the boxes in those games aren’t constrained by the cruel realities of Euclidean space the way my work must be. It doesn’t help that I don’t know a damn thing about woodworking, but I decided not to let that stop me from pouring in the effort. I was going to build a puzzle box. This is the story of that project, which wen...| Brandes Stoddard
If you’re like Kainenchen and me, you’ve been utterly| Brandes Stoddard
It’s been a lot longer than I realized since I last wrote| Brandes Stoddard
With some brainstorming help from friends last week, 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 look like small pieces of amber that encase motes of light; the color of the light suggests something about the mood of the memory or the nature of the creature who first had the memory.| Brandes Stoddard
In a recent post, I drew a side-view map of the Ruby Talon| Brandes Stoddard
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.| Brandes Stoddard
Okay, I’ve gone away and had a long think about a core resolution mechanic for a Dust to Dust-based tabletop game. For aesthetic reasons, a core resolution mechanic for this game should involve dominoes, but what if it’s a combination dice-and-dominoes system? (The fact that both “dice-and-dominoes” and “Dust to Dust” involve initial letters very […]| Brandes Stoddard
It doesn’t seem possible that it has been almost two years| Brandes Stoddard
One of my professional projects and working on Citadel LARP| Brandes Stoddard
My gaming schedule has given me a lot more chances to see people create new 5e characters lately, including more than a few fighters and paladins. Some of those players set out to be the tankiest tanks that ever tanked, so they pick up the Protection fighting style, and… it kinda works, but the more I see it, the less I like it. Specifically, I think it comes in well behind all of the other fighting styles of the Player’s Handbook, to say nothing of the much more egregious ones proposed i...| Brandes Stoddard
I got the first draft of a major project done, so I’m giving| Brandes Stoddard
I’ve got a number of issues with the way the 2024 rules| Brandes Stoddard
In a conversation over on a social media site that shall| Brandes Stoddard
