If you are standing in the Dome of Heaven, you appear to be on a large landscape, with a tall dome arching overhead. On the interior surface of the Dome, there appears to be more land (and more oceans, and more clouds). The sages teach that the Dome is actually a sphere, and the dome-like appearance is a natural illusion.
Continue reading “A Short Introduction to the Dome of Heaven”
So I’m working on the Gygax 75 challenge by Ray Otis. In part 2, the surrounding area, you make an encounter table for the area. The table uses a 2d6 roll, and he advises putting the weaker encounters in the middle of the range, so they are more common.
That’s all well and good, but I have a trade road moving through my area. I was thinking I should have one table for the road and one table for off the road. But there would be some overlap between the two tables, and I was trying to think of a way to make one table. Then I remembered the dice mechanics of Silent Death (an old spaceship combat game), and came up with 3M tables. Although I would not be at all surprised if someone else came up with this idea previously and called it something else.
There are two types of campaigns: newbie campaigns and veteran campaigns. Some of the following rules apply only to one type of campaign or the other. Those rules will clarify which campaigns they apply to, all other rules apply to all campaigns.
There was a post on reddit about moderating the player vs. player randomness when rolling ability scores. There was some sentiment that if you want players to be evenly matched, don’t roll; only roll if you’re okay with some players having better abilities.
I initially agreed with that assessment, and posted some stats about the expected variability. But then I realized that it is valid to want different levels of variability, so I went through my list of ways to roll abilities, and did some simulations to try and find a range of possibilities with different variability between players. Continue reading “Player vs. Player Variability When Rolling Abilities”
So I’ve always wanted to make a 20 level random dungeon, ever since I was in middle school with the random dungeon tables in the AD&D DMG. Well, now that I’m retired I have some time on my hands, so I did just that. This is exactly the sort of silly, stupid shit I intended to do in my retirement. However, I used the tables in the 5E DMG. Continue reading “Random Dungeon”
This is an outline of my idea for a campaign based on some ideas I got from Matthew Colville. The basic idea is that you want to allow the players to play the fantasy they want, and since you are putting in a lot of the work as a DM, you want to put in your ideas as well. To do that, you let the player’s help build the world by building their characters.
You start with a port city on an inland sea, like the Mediterranean. This allows for a lot of different cultures to be interacting with each other. This is called Shareport, or something similar. This will be the PCs home base to start with. Continue reading “Shareport Campaign”
I saw some Reddit posts recently about rolling ability scores, or not rolling ability scores. I thought up a couple ideas, and started thinking about possibilities, and then went down the al-miraj hole of internet research. Listed below are the ability generating variants that I found. I broke them apart into individual pieces that can be mixed an matched. I tried to identify numbers that you could vary to fit your tastes, which I typically called N, with values people stated they were using in parentheses. Continue reading “Rolling Abilities in Dungeons & Dragons”