Leonine Roar

Love your home brew campaign setting, and how much you borrow, pillage or re-imagine for your own, unique world?  Does its breadth, evocative landscapes and both natural and unnatural dangers excite you?  Looking for that next bit of inspiration for your next home brew campaign?

Much like Dark Sun or the Underdark, the natural world – its amazing and colorful contours, mighty forces of nature, and motley natives – have served as simple, yet powerful inspiration for countless homebrew D&D campaigns since the dawn of the game. 

Looking for some help on how to decide where you and your player characters should explore or journey to next?  

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What really is the difference between these two popular tabletop RPGs? 

Dragon Age has gotten a lot of hype in both video game and tabletop RPG form, so my playgroup has been curious.  And well, after playing in a Dragon Age-inspired heroic tier Shadowfell campaign, my brother was itching to GM an official DA campaign, including their unique rules system. 

We’re all veteran D&D gamers – and really haven’t played much at all besides D&D all our lives.  I mean, we’ve loved every edition, and it’s always been the RPG, so why mess with a good thing?  Still, even loyal D&D gamers like us yearned for something different, perhaps something even more elegant than 4e’s rules-heavy and tactically rich environment. 

So with only our resident power gamer fearing the worst, the rest of us welcomed the chance to try something different every other week while I continued to run our D&D 4e epic tier Frostfell campaign in between.  (My brother and I rotate DMing a good portion of the year, week-to-week.  If your group doesn’t give your “main” DM a break and a chance to play now and again like this, it should!)

And so, last week, we played our very first Dragon Age dark fantasy RPG game!  Much like Newbie DM’s experience, we loved it.  And I especially loved now being able to compare D&D 4e with Dragon Age.

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What is the most exciting yet most time-consuming part of your games?  That’s right, the exhilarating and pitched combat that we all love in our favorite tabletop RPG. 

Combat can drag, for many reasons.  But what if you had a wealth of game knowledge and design tricks to launch and conclude combat quickly – without sacrificing the excitement?  Is there a way to achieve such combat enlightenment? 

There is now!  This past summer Johnn Four (a force in the RPG industry for a dozen years with immensely helpful sites like Roleplaying Tips and its famous newsletter) and I talked about collaborating to create a new and powerful instructional guide and resource to help all D&D and Pathfinder GMs who wanted to take their combats to the next level – and do it fast! 

And so, Johnn and I teamed up to create and bring you Faster Combat! 

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Finding the right ritual for a given situation, challenge or problem – that’s what takes most of the time and effort for ritual use in your games, isn’t it?  Whether you’re a player or DM, it can seem like a lot of work to integrate rituals into your game as a clever resource. 

Until now!  Chris Sims put together a Rituals Index, something I had been looking forward to after taking a shot at something like it myself just months prior in Rituals Re-Organized. 

Here’s a brief review of the index plus some of my advice on using it in your game – including the most helpful and important part which starts on page 16: Reference Groupings.  These will change the way you think about and use rituals in your game, giving them more stage time and rounding out your D&D campaign and story in creative and memorable ways.

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