Caverns of the Spore Lord is an adventure from Kobold Press, and the first written for the Tales of the Valiant product. ToV is a 5e system, so it's directly compatible with other 5e implementations. It's a short adventure for level 1 adventurers, with just 17 pages of content not including appen...
I've been playing Mansions of Madness a lot lately, which is a game I love but also one that inspires a lot of thought about strategy and roleplay. In a tabletop roleplaying game, like Tales of the Valiant or Pathfinder or Shadowrun, you often make up a strategy based on how you think your...
I've been running a Tomb of Annihilation campaign for about a year now, and I can't honestly say it's been quite as nice as running a good module like Expedition to Castle Ravenloft or Rise of the Runelords. It's my fault, because Tomb of Annihilation is actually a sandbox. I understand the...
About 6 years ago, I bought a set of hero miniatures by Wizkids. They weren't the first miniatures I'd ever bought, but at the time they were the nicest, partly because they were already painted in the box (I didn't think I was capable of painting miniatures back then, and to be fair didn't really...
If you're used to D&D 5e but have [wisely] switched away from Wizards of the Coast, then you might be playing Pathfinder 2. And if you're the Game Master for a Pathfinder 2 campaign, then you might notice your players staying at level 1 for a lot longer than you're used to. D&D 5e and its unofficial...
Visually, you can never go wrong by adding a skull or two. I don't know what it is about the insides of our own heads, but for some reason we humans think fleshless cranial bones are pretty cool. I'm no exception, and in fact I've had a tattoo of a skull on my arm for years now. Skulls are iconic an...
Armies in Warhammer 40,000 aren't meant to be static. Like the game world itself, your army is meant to be a developing force, with new recruits and veteran soldiers sharing the battlefield, learning and adapting and improving as they experience new horrors of war. To simulate that, Warhammer 40,...
Like many hobbyist game designers before me, I recently had the idea of taking photographs of beautiful fantasy-like settings, for lack of a reliable source of custom illustration, and use them in a game book. No matter how hard I tried though, I just couldn't make the photographs feel like a fantas...
If you've never read the Lord of the Rings, or you read it a long time ago, then you might not realise that there are 6 books in the series. They're sold in just 3 volumes, called Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King, but each volume is divided into two books ea...
For me, the Blackstone Fortress and Cursed City releases of the Warhammer Quest boxed game from Games Workshop are practically perfect games. They're extremely replayable, but they're board games and are, appropriately, bound to their boards. They each tell a specific story. Blackstone Fortr...
About half-way through the lifespan of Dragon and Dungeon magazines, a company called Paizo was commissioned to take over publication. After the Dungeon and Dragon and Polyhedron magazines were discontinued, Paizo obstinantly continued to publish adventures for D&D. And from magazine t...
In The Two Towers, Book III, there's an intriguing conversation that happens between Gimli and Legolas. Gimli is waxing poetic about the caverns and halls of Helm's Deep, and in response Legolas says:
You move me, Gimli. I have never heard you speak like this before. Almost you make me regret...
In the Warhammer 40,000 universe, the Genestealer Cult is a forbidden religious body of humans that worship aliens. And not just any alien. They worship the evil human-eating, legally-distinct [not] xenomorphs, the Tyranids. At first, I viewed them as a sort of an unexciting mishmash of Chaos Cu...
I like to be able to build characters for a tabletop roleplaying game quickly. A fast build is useful for a player when you're planning a short one-shot session and don't want to spend half of that session on character generation. It's useful for a Game Master when you're trying to generate several...
When I started painting miniatures, I painted the models that came included in board games. Those weren't exactly high quality miniatures, but they were fun and I was just excited to have painted playing pieces. Hungry for more, I bought the Games Workshop board game Blackstone Fortress, which inc...
Before I plucked up the courage to try painting miniatures, I basically thought it was just too hard. I have bad eyes, not terribly steady hands, and I'd never done anything with paint since watercolours in elementary school. Eventually, I gave it a go and while I don't claim to be good at it, the r...