Tales from the Tipsy Mermaid

It occured to me Thursday as I was working on the newly updated D&D archives for this very blog that I've got more than enough material here to create an entire Wanderhaven sourcebook. I think I might actually do that, using the pay-what-you-want model on DriveThruRPG and also maybe drop the damned thing as a free download on Amazon. I'll then add a link in the Foreword where folks can support my other projects, and with luck, that will actually help sell a few copies of other stuff I've written.

I'll have to use AI for all the art, unfortunately, which is a very large part of why I do not want to charge for this "new" project. I realize full well that modern AI creates via statistically driven machine-plagiarism, and that charging for other people's work is a sin. 

Nevertheless, I feel like I should still do *something* with all this stuff.

Anyway. Behold this cover for the would-be Wanderhaven sourcebook, TALES FROM THE TIPSY MERMAID. 

What do you think, friends?

D&D Adventure Archives

Friends, I get requests almost every day for the PDF version of "The Mystery of Malvern Manor". 

I expanded "Malvern Manor" into "Mordecai's Monster"
a few years ago for EN Publishing.

D&D: Penguinoids

My daughter Emma and I discussed some D&D character ideas the other night. I then wrote this yesterday on my way into work.

Penguinoids

Noble but rare and often somewhat reclusive, the Penguinoids of the polar regions live in settlements scattered across the polar tundra. Many fear outsiders, but a select few venture forth to trade and to see the world.

AI conceptions of Penguinoid adventurers. All pics via Microsoft's Copilot app.

Penguinoids revere nature and their great Goddess of Frost. Tribal Arctic Penguinoids tend to be Druidic, living close to the land. More civilized Emperor Penguinoids live in a handful of large towns that dot the Arctic coastline.

Some Quick Thoughts on Baldur's Gate 3

I bought Larian's new D&D computer game, Baldur's Gate III, via the Google Stadia this week.  

I am not a gamer.  I like tabletop D&D quite a bit and have played the previous iterations of various D&D computer games like Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights, but those are absolutely the only computer games that I ever play.  Really,I don't give two shits about computer gaming.  I just happen to like Dungeons & Dragons despite having no easy way to play much anymore nor overmuch time to spend sitting around a table.

Your first sidekick is kind of a badass.  This was a great storytelling choice.

These are my thoughts.  Take them for whatever they are worth.

D&D Travelogue: The Tipsy Mermaid

Welcome back to Dungeons & Dragons Travelogue.  

I’ve said before that I’ve always felt that the biggest challenge of running an adventure in D&D is managing the travel and intermittent locations.  Good storytellers show their players fantastic worlds, letting them experience that sense of wonder for themselves. What they don’t do is explain, “This is wonderful and weird.” Alas, that’s not an easy thing to do on the fly.

Breakwater Bay is modeled on the real world town Bar Harbor, Maine.
This shot is of the actual town.

My goal here is not grandiose.  I simply want to note a few unique locations ahead of time for use in travel or downtime scenes. Today’s location is an upscale tavern in Breakwater Bay called The Tipsy Mermaid.

Mermaids Revisited: A PC Playable Race for D&D’s 5th Edition (Ver. 2.0)

We've been using these rules in our home game for months, but I've only just gotten around to writing them up for you. We see that you've been reading our original Mermaid article, so hopefully you'll like the revision.

Mermaids from ancient myth...

D&D Tab Revision

I edited and updated the blog's D&D Tab this morning.  I wanted to get everything collected in one place and organized at least somewhat logically.  It's all on one page now with the following sections:

• General Storytelling 
• Play Reports
• Wanderhaven: Our Campaign & Story Setting
• The Kingdom of the Western Isles
• Mythology, Religion, and the Known World
• The Wanderhaven Sourcebook
• Wanderhaven Adventures & Adventure Articles
• Travelogue
• Forgotten Realms Book Reviews
• D&D Next and the Playtest Process

I realized as I went through this that there's easily enough unpublished fiction here to put out a new short story collection for the Kindle, so that's my next project.  I may also (finally) collect a PDF of material for the so-called Wanderhaven Source Book, but that's kind of a longer undertaking.  Alas, half of these ideas have been overcome by officially published material.

Anyway, material from the reconfigured tab is reprinted below.  Let me know what you think!

D&D Travelogue: The Lonely Totem Pole

I’ve always felt that one of the biggest challenges of running a Dungeons & Dragons game is managing travel. On the one hand, no one wants to bog their game down in travel exposition that is essentially outside the story’s major narrative. On the other hand, one of the reasons folks enjoy fantasy is for its ability to get us outside the real world. Travel is a big part of that.

Not for nothing did J.R.R. Tolkien subtitle his first book There and Back Again. The travel is the story in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

D&D: Race to the Temple of Storms

Race to the Temple of Storms is a short Dungeons & Dragons adventure balanced for a party of four PCs of fourth level.  I ran it for my kids on Friday last week in a little over ninety minutes.

Race to the Temple of Storms (PDF)

D&D: Guinea Pigs & Were-Guinea Pigs

My daughter Hannah goes to an agricultural high school in Trumbull, and what with COVID-19 having shut down the planet, we’re currently hosting her class’s guinea pigs.  It turns out that they make good pets.  They’ve become family favorites, which means that it’s now time to figure out how to work them into our home Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

Yours truly with Giblet, the Lord of Guinea Pigs.

If you've never been around guinea pigs, then you might not realize how loud and distracting they can be.  My base theory is that they're mostly useless in combat save for this ability to serve as a distraction.  However, there are any number of ways that they might work in-game beyond simple combat.  Thinking through some of that has been an interesting exercise.

The Disappearance of Jaxon Carrows

Over the past several months, the port town of Breakwater Bay has lost a number of small fishing boats.  The disappearances have put the local fishermen on edge, so when Captain Jaxon Carrows and his boat Salty Dog go missing, the Breakwater Bay town council approaches the party to find out what’s happening.  Over the course of their investigation, the party discovers a sahuagin cult moving into the local waters, opposed by a tribe of lizardfolk.  The lizardfolk make good would-be allies if the party can convince them of the value of an alliance.

The Disappearance of Jaxon Carrows is designed for a party of four to five player-characters of 3rd or 4th level.  It’s meant as a one-shot, running from four to six hours depending on your pace of play.

Note.  This adventure is based loosely around the Ghosts of Saltmarsh adventure Danger at Dunwater.  The changes I’ve made change Dunwater’s overarching plot idea into a slow reveal mystery.

The Disappearance of Jaxon Carrows (PDF via Google Drive)

D&D: Swordmage Revisited

Dungeons & Dragons’ 4th edition had a huge array of classes divided up into four main party roles--Leader, Defender, Striker, and Controller.  The different classes allowed for different expressions of core party responsibilities within a wide variety of potential character themes.  Leaders healed, Defenders were tanks, Strikers assassinated single targets, and Controllers shaped the battlefield, generally through area effect burst or blast-type spells.  The upside of this was that not every party had to have a Rogue or a Cleric in order to pick locks and/or stay alive in combat.  The downside was that over time, a lot of 4e’s classes started to look basically alike.

5th edition is generally more like 2e than 4e, but it hasn’t gone completely away from 4e’s role versatility in classes.  The game’s current edition offers a few ways to tank like a Defender, for example, in the Fighter, Paladin, and even Barbarian classes, and the Bard and Cleric are still both designed basically in the Leader role.  However, there still not a great way to tank with an arcane class, and though this is far from a game-breaking failure, it is an issue that Wizards of the Coast (WotC) has tried to address.

Just a swordmage, fighting a dragon. Nothing to see here except beautiful, stylish fantasy art by Raiddo.https://t.co/UzA5pPxb8K#dnd #dnd5e #dmsguild pic.twitter.com/h682HVqegk

— Jean Lorber (@jlorber4) November 25, 2017

The Mermaid: A PC Race Design for D&D

We have a rule at our house.  Everyone in our family has to make a Christmas gift for everyone else in the family.  My daughter Hannah has been clamoring to play D&D as a mermaid for months now, so this design for a Mermaid Player-Character race was my made-gift to her.

It's pretty simple, but she was delighted with it, immediately launching into a deep discussion of the four sub-races of mermaids--arctic, tropical, river, and deep--and their shared history, theology, and lineage.

We may publish an update with the four sub-races.  Who knows?

5 Things on a Friday: We Take an Easy Week

This felt like a slow news week up until yesterday afternoon.  But as much as I'm personally happy that Scott Pruitt is finally leaving the EPA, I don't have anything to add to the story beyond the basics.  I searched for additional stories of relative importance but still didn't find very much.  

So this week’s post is a lot of college football and a bit of D&D.  Yay?

Reimagining the Dungeons & Dragons Cartoon

The old 1980s-era Dungeons & Dragons cartoon from Marvel Studios has been getting some love on Twitter this week, with guys like Nathan Stewart, Senior Director of Dungeons & Dragons, seemingly paying some attention.  This blog has done almost nothing but football for the last several weeks, so in the interest of both content diversity and helping to press for a quality D&D cartoon reboot, let’s talk about what a new show might potentially look like.

I want a #DnD cartoon again! Help me, @Wizards_DnD !!! Good wholesome cartoon for the whole family, please! https://t.co/zHfGgxU6vD

— Alphastream (@Alphastream) September 18, 2017

D&D with Kids: “The Sunless Citadel” Play Report

We were up in Maine last week, and as we have been wont to do while on vacation, the girls and I sat down for a few sessions of D&D while we were there.  We all enjoy D&D, but we never seem to play as much as we want when we’re at home, owing to the busy nature of our Real Lives.  Life’s a little different up in Maine, however, and this time in particular, I went up with a goal.  I wanted the kids to come away with a legitimate understanding of how to play their characters to their fullest potential.

I wanted them to “get” the game, not just the basics of combat mechanics.

I decided to run The Sunless Citadel out of the recently released Tales from the Yawning Portal.  The adventure’s intro notes that it was designed in part to help teach the game, and in this it performed flawlessly.  It was also relatively short.  We got through it over the course of our week away, totally maybe eight hours of actual play.  This included character set-up and level-ups along with one wholly unrelated side-quest written and run by my older daughter Hannah.

D&D Feedback: Revised Maneuvers for the Cavalier

Wizards of the Coast released a new version of their Cavalier subclass for the Fighter this week via Unearthed Arcana, and if I like it better than the original version of the subclass, it’s nevertheless still not particularly close to being something that I would actually play.  That’s a shame.  As a former armored cavalry officer, I would really like to find a way to play some kind of mounted heavy cavalryman.  I just don’t think WotC is there yet in terms of class design

Full disclosure: Just as this is WotC’s first take on this subclass, so too is it mine.  However, my last take was way back during the D&D Next Playtest.

D&D 5e Homebrew: The Bard College of Ballet

My daughter Emma gave me this idea a few weeks ago when she told me that she has become a Level 1 Ballerina.  I asked her what happens when she levels-up, and she replied, “I learn more tricks and stunts and stuff.”

Okay.  I can work with that.

The Adventures of Sneax & Elaina Emboo (Part 8)

Our Story So Far:

Sneakatara Boatman was abandoned as a child by parents she never knew.  Life in the orphanage was tough for a tiny girl with few ways to defend herself, so she lit out as soon as she was able.  But the streets of Docks District are no safer than life was at the orphanage, and now the loathsome street criminal Russitan Lassiter has Sneax at his mercy.

Elaina Emboo is a rich girl from a merchant family, but her controlling father already has her entire life mapped out.  Elaina envies Sneax's freedom without truly understanding its costs.  Still, she agree to help when Sneax asks her to head up to the Old Church to meet with Lassiter.  

Sneax and Elaina get the scare of their lives when they realize that Lassiter has an appointment with Draks, the fire elf, that he and Draks are working to import an illegal shipment of DISTILLED TIGER ESSENCE into Wanderhaven.  But when that shipment goes missing?

That's when things start getting crazy...

The Adventures of Sneax & Elaina Emboo (Part 6)

Our Story So Far:
Sneakatara Boatman was abandoned as a child by parents she never knew.  Life in the orphanage was tough for a tiny girl with few ways to defend herself, so she lit out as soon as she was able.  But the streets of Docks District are no safer than life was at the orphanage, and now the loathsome street criminal Russitan Lassiter has Sneax at his mercy.

Elaina Emboo is a rich girl from a merchant family, but her controlling father already has her entire life mapped out.  Elaina envies Sneax's freedom without truly understanding its costs.  Still, she agree to help when Sneax asks her to head up to the Old Church to meet with Lassiter.  

Sneax and Elaina get the scare of their lives when they realize that Lassiter has an appointment with Draks, the fire elf.  

Then things start getting crazy...