Author Archives: Law

A is for Angels, Virtuous Jerks

Remember last year, when I said I had more characters who began with A than any other letter? It turns out A is also a competitive letter for “highest number of interesting monsters”. I’m starting to think we’re all just … Continue reading

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A to Z Challenge: Monsters with Quirks

It’s nearly April again, and that means it’s almost time for the A-to-Z Blogging Challenge. Last year I talked about the characters my players have brought to the table and what made them memorable, for better or worse. This year … Continue reading

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Death by Cliché

I used to be a voracious reader. In the days before I got into tabletop gaming, when I was much shorter, I read pretty much everything I could get my hands on. I preferred science fiction, but I spent a … Continue reading

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Serious Stories and Emotional Taxes

It takes a lot for me to drop a story early. I’ve struggled enough with pacing and storytelling to know how important a good beginning, middle, and end are to any narrative, and I feel like I can’t effectively judge … Continue reading

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An Attempt at Truly Improvisational DMing

Over the course of my DMing career, I’ve slowly moved from a rigid style to something looser. When I started off, I was one of those DMs who had to have every beat of the story planned, every NPC statted … Continue reading

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Wish

Some years ago, when I frequented the Wizards D&D message boards, there was a user whose signature said something to the effect of “the spiked chain exists to find the DMs brave enough to ban Core material”. That is, the … Continue reading

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The Art of Art

Our campaigns tend to have three names: an real one, a colloquial one, and a snarky one. I’ve talked about how The Eight Arms and the Memento Mori quickly became The Monster-Hunting Campaign and soon after became The Monster-Friending Campaign. … Continue reading

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House Rule: Three-Axis Cosmology

Especially astute readers may have picked up on this in the last article: …the players suffered a planar travel mishap and ended up on Carceri, the plane of prisons…Instead I told the players on their way out the door that … Continue reading

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The Art of the Retcon

I’m wrong a lot. Like, a lot. It’s a big part of the reason my first campaigns were so incredibly linear, because I couldn’t reconcile being the all-powerful expert running the game with being the guy who thought his rubber … Continue reading

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On November

I need to apologize for November. I didn’t have everything lined up nearly as well as I thought I did when I signed off to work on National Novel Writing Month. I should have realized other people would have the … Continue reading

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