James the GM

  B2 . The Entrance to the Ossuary So when we left off in the design of this new dungeon, I had detailed the first level, which was entirely newly added with no pre-existing info in my notes about the original work.   Today, we’re gonna start the actual work of redesigning (and expanding) the bits that I’ve already worked on. I think my overarching lesson (or at least the thing that I’m ruminating the most on) during this post is gonna be scope and theme.   When it comes to brainstorming, I usually have my best ideas either in the shower or while walking my dog.   This case is no different – while walking my dog, I decided that I want this adventure to have 5 levels of dungeon.   Why 5?   Well, because.    It’s an utterly arbitrary number.   But it gives me a discreet goal to work towards, and has a great side effect – I can theme each dungeon floor in a way that works for me and, ideally, reinforces the OVERALL theme of the entire advent...

 I'm a member of several gaming communities online, most notably the  Shadowdark RPG Official Group  on Facebook.  And it seems like every few weeks (or days) a post pops up asking about homebrew rules that different GMs use at their tables.  Now, I'm particularly fond of mine, so I figured what the hell, I'll throw together a blog post talking about what my rules are and why I made the changes that I did. #1: Zoned Combat This one really isn't a house rule, but rather it's the way that I interpret the rules and implement them.  Shadowdark already simplifies distances into Close, Near, and Far, which establishes zones quite easily.  I apply this at the table by using Professor Dungeon Master's Ultimate Dungeon Terrain , rather than using a dry erase map or dungeon tiles. To really fully grok how UDT works, I recommend watching the linked video (and honestly, I just recommend that channel in general, he's GREAT), but here's a quick and dirty version: UD...

  I've been in a bit of a creative rut lately. My home game is running through the Keep on the Borderlands, using Shadowdark RPG.  I'm adding to it based on some of my favorite supplemental content from the web, but it's not quite scratching my itch to make something cool and dark and fucked up. So, I opened up my various notebooks and found this: This was a small dungeon that I cribbed together over the course of a few hours to add some context to a Curse of Strahd game I was running a year or two ago.  The crux of it all was that in an ossuary behind a waterfall, the party found thousands of skulls and murals telling the bloody history of Barovia. I LOVED this dungeon.  It was probably my second favorite thing that came out of my reworking of Strahd (my favorite being the way that I ran the church encounter in the village of Barovia, but that's work for another day).   Anywho, I decided to take the basis of this dungeon and expand on it, Jacquays t...