Using treasure tokens in D&D

The release of Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, as fun as it is, should be seen in the context of the Plane Shift documents that provide more Magic the Gathering settings for Dungeons and Dragons. This also included a free adventure "X Marks the Spot" for the Ixalan campaign. Among other cool things ported from MtG into D&D, it uses …

Tomb of Annihilation: Hex crawl procedure

As previously noted, the first half of Tomb of Annihilation largely consists of a hex crawl. This means that, outside of keyed hexes with static encounters, the game in this portion consists of procedurally-generated content. Do the adventurers get lost? Do they have enough supplies? Do they have any random encounters? For my own needs, I …

Forge of Fury: Random Encounter Tables

In Tales from the Yawning Portal, we have a collection of some of the best (well, most popular) dungeons from D&D's history, updated for Fifth Edition. Adventurers who delve into these dark holes in the ground can uncover lost secrets and discover untold wealth... or die trying. But players themselves can be a bit risk averse …

Running the Sunless Citadel

My group has now wrapped up the Sunless Citadel. I may run it again for a future group; actually, that would be fantastic as this is really a lovely adventure. Here are some notes for my use. Maybe you can find some use for some of them as inspiration for your own campaign! I also …

Catacombs of the Shield Queen

The Shield Queen ruled benevolently over her realm for years, served by her faithful shield maidens. During that time, the land experienced peace & prosperity. Justice extended from the highest courtier to the lowliest servant. But the official records show that an attempted palace coup by a vassal knight led to her death. The squabbling …

Heavy metal inspired quests

A few weeks ago, I set up a Pandora station called "OSR Radio". It plays music my buddies and I listened to while playing RPGs in the wayback. Think Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, etc. Lots of the songs sound like they could inspire some fun D&D adventures. I have tried to avoid the …

Road mysteries

Random encounters can accomplish a lot of things. Some groups see them as annoying obstacles. Others like them for a bit bonus XP while the GM puts a little extra strain on their resources. But they can also give a hint of weirdness to tell your players that the world has more going on than kobolds …

Building a random dungeon with the 5e DMG

Let's say you don't want to use an existing dungeon generator for some reason. Maybe you have some time to kill in a parking garage and can't reach the Internet. Maybe you want to draw a map but nothing comes to mind. You could do worse than use "Appendix A: Random Dungeons" from the D&D …

Building the framework of a dungeon adventure

I've wanted to try to generate an adventure with the random tables in the new Dungeon Master's Guide since I bought it. Here I present one example of my experimentation. Note that I didn't fudge any rolls - all this reflects actual results. Location-based adventure Because my current "sandbox" campaign focuses on dungeon crawls, I'll start …