The Bogeywoman's Cave

(From Pathfinder) Adventurers are an oddity, and finding others of their kind is usually a difficulty, but not in Motleyville. Motleyville is an odd place, it is one of the few places in the Holy Empire where magic is practiced openly, differences are embraced rather than shamed, and the church holds little power. The town was formed about a decade ago by Molly Lanchester, a woman who ran away from her noble family with her lover, Caroline, and went on a series of adventures that made her rich and cost her legs. After years of the couple's delving into forbidden places, they decided to make a place for people like themselves, and with the help of other adventurers they'd met in their travels, founded the town of Motleyville. The Imperial Inquisition hates the town, and deeply desires to see it razed to the ground, but the substantial number of capable warriors and magicians that protect it make this a difficult task. The town itself has been enchanted to make those with ...

Woodwose HD 1 AC light (12) ATK 1 club DMG 1d6 HDE 1 Woodwose are what happens when humans or demi-humans are kidnapped by faeries. Through eldritch rituals, the humans become bestial and hirsute, growing sharp teeth, and occasionally even small horns. These creatures are sometimes used by the faerie folk as slaves, similar to how the goblins were used before they escaped their bondage, but sometimes they are simply released into the woods. Woodwose are sometimes called beast-folk by commoners, and few know that they were once human beings. Changelings HD 4 AC medium (14) ATK 1 claw DMG 2d6 HDE 6 Changelings are malicious faeries that can take the form of any humanoid being they touch. This process occurs over the course of 1d6 rounds. In their natural form, changelings appear as chitinous, stunted humanoids with sharp teeth and sharper claws. They typically come in the night, abducting or killing their victims while they sleep, and then taking their place. Changeling...

There are all sorts of good random tables out there, from countless different systems, along with all sorts of lists available with adventure hooks, dungeon dressing, traps, etc. But none of these tools are actually useful unless you can use them on the table. So, I did just that, and started printing out pages from various .pdfs I have to put in one big binder of DM resources! Here is the cover Some Palace of the Vampire Queen style empty dungeon keys, in case I need to make something in a hurry/want to make a reference key for an adventure. Krevborna's Gothic Adventure Generator, in case I want to run something more role-play heavy than a dungeon crawl. I have a couple pages from my house rules, not the whole document, but stuff like a list of magic items and this handy generic monster table. For outdoor adventuring I printed out a few pages of lay of the land tables from Hubris. I also put in most of the appendixes from the AD&D Dungeon Master's ...

Your players dwell in Sigil, or some equivalent city at the center of a multiverse. They are hired by a organization of inter-dimensional smugglers to retrieve rare goods from other worlds, to be sold in the grand bazaar. Weird characters are encouraged, and as long as it is somewhat balanced, races and classes of all kinds are allowed (though this may run the characters into problems if they materialize in 17th century Europe with a half-orc, a robot, and a zombie). In order to maintain an element of player choice, characters are allowed to pick from at least 2 possible missions that are given to them by their superiors. These missions may be adventures written by oneself, or modules taken from elsewhere. Its not important to make the adventures fit into the campaign world, since the campaign world is every single world. Adventures begin with a briefing of what the party has to acquire, along with relevant information about the world they will be adventuring in, followed by the pa...

Honestly at this rate I'm going to need a separate tag for long boring posts about my opinions on things. 1. XP For Combat This method is dumb, it sucks, it takes too long and requires too much combat. I know the stereotype of Old School D&D is "Go into the hole, kill orcs and take their stuff", but combat is far too lethal and XP for kills in Ye Olde Dungeons & Dragons to make this method of leveling up logical or fun. Also just, murder for experience seems dumb, like "I am a cleric I gain my powers from my faith in God and I just murdered a bunch of dudes and now I can heal people better" doesn't make sense. 2. XP For Exploration I think I read something somewhere about people giving XP for each room/hex/whatever they find, something like 100 XP for a room or something. This seems fun, I'm not sure how the progression would work out as one gains higher levels, but it seems like it would maybe work?  3. XP For Gold I like and use t...

(Image taken from Realms of Crawling Chaos by Goblinoid Games) Its that time again! Its time for me to update my homebrew system!! Link is here Brief summary of what has changed: Rogues are overhauled because the d6 based skill system was too limiting in my opinion, and also made it hard for members of other classes to have anything in the rules pointing towards what to do when a non-combat challenge happened. Instead of a cumbersome system for using a d18 or a d20, instead the rules now only reference a d20, but supply advice for simulating a d20 with d6s as well as other methods. Minor tweaks and additions, including an alternate stat generation system. ALSO I MADE MY OWN PERSONAL LITTLE MONSTER MANUAL THINGY (Image unrelated but Holy Shit !!! Taken from the Pathfinder Advanced Player's Guide) A while back I wrote a post about 6 occult tomes , including the Bestiarum Monstrorum, an incomplete manuscript written by a now-dead monster hunter. In the spirit o...

A lot of time is given to advising game masters on how to make a fun and enjoyable game, but I feel like something that is missing is advice for players on how to enjoy a game. I feel like my advice on this subject can be boiled down to the following points: Originality is overrated What is fun is more important than what is smart The world is yours to explore, and to help create Make your hero larger than life Rolling to seduce sucks 1. Originality is overrated D&D is built on cliches, hackneyed plots, and other peoples' ideas. The city of Greyhawk is Lankhmar with the serial numbers filed off, halflings are hobbits, balors are balrogs, and heck, every slime based monster is almost certainly derived from a combination of shoggoths and The Blob. If you want to play a brutish barbarian, rippling with muscle and wielding a ridiculous sword, go for it! If you want to be a stalwart knight, clad in shining armor and riding a white horse, nobody is stopping you! It doesn...

Warning: The Following Is A Pointless, Ambling Ramble With No Rhyme Or Reason Rak-Arnesh is not properly a megadungeon, since each level has about 20 rooms (well, exactly 20 per level so far, but whatever), and typically proper megadungeons may have anywhere from 100 to 400 rooms per level! However, something to note about this is that classical megadungeons were not very detailed. Lets take a look at WGR1: Greyhawk Ruins, a later attempt to publish Castle Greyhawk as a module. This is one of the few published megadungeons, and it is incredibly verbose, much more so than Gygax's original notes for the dungeon. Even in Greyhawk Ruins, a module which is, in my opinion, nigh unusuable due to the vast degree of information given, there are some rooms that are just marked as empty, with no detail at all. Sometimes multiple rooms in a row. And some keyed areas encompass such a ridiculously large amount of space that they may as well have just been marked as empty, such as this: ...

[Note: What follows is very much a work in progress, and is the beginning of a project to make a decently sized dungeon for use with my house rules, and old school elf games in general. I am making this for my own personal enjoyment and use, so do not expect the kind of quality that a paid product will provide.] The second level of the subterranean vault of the Serpent-folk was refitted as a tomb for human warriors centuries ago. However, due to the foul magic that seeps into the halls, it is now home to murderous undead. (Screenshot from Skyrim) Level 2 1. Ladder leads down from 1 st level 8 skeletons stand stock-still until characters enter, then they attack 2. Open and empty coffins One coffin has a small leather bag containing two 500 coin gems within it 3. Spears extend from the walls if a pressure plate is stepped on, dealing 2d6 damage unless a saving throw is made 4. Tombstone in the center of the room that reads the n...

[Note: What follows is very much a work in progress, and is the beginning of a project to make a decently sized dungeon for use with my house rules, and old school elf games in general. I am making this for my own personal enjoyment and use, so do not expect the kind of quality that a paid product will provide.] This Temple of Rak-Arnesh was originally constructed by the serpent-folk in primeval times. Now it is inhabited by all number of creatures. From the outside, the temple appears as a small, gray stone pyramid, though in reality this is only the entrance structure to a much grander subterranean labyrinth.. The ruined temple is only a day's march from the nearest town, and is rumored to hold vast amounts of treasure, if one has the courage to brave the depths of the underworld for gold and glory... (Image via David de Groot on Flickr) Level 1 1. Stairs lead down from above into the dungeon level Pile of scrap wood Small worktable with t...

It began after you sliced your finger by accident. You were in the attic, and had bumped into a pile of boxes, causing an old model ship in a bottle to fall to the floor, shattering its container. Cursing your clumsiness, you leaned down to clean up the shards, noticing for the first time the strange magic circle carved into the attic's floor. Distracted, you got a nasty cut on your index finger, causing the blood to flow like a waterfall of crimson. Nothing has been the same since then. The Blood Goblin HP 48 (4 per every hit die the player characters possess in total) AC medium ATK 2 claws (+4 to hit) DMG 1d6+2 Special: The goblin can appear anywhere where there is spilt blood. If even a drop of blood falls to the ground or splashes on to the wall, it is possible for the goblin to teleport to that spot, absorbing the blood as it does so. The Blood Goblin is a demonic entity that feeds on the blood of humans. Every year, it must drink the blood of at least 10 individu...