Tag Archives: blerd

Holistic World Building Part 3: Monstering Your World

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Originally, this was going to be part of a twofer post on faiths and monsters, but both components turned out to have way more scope than anticipated. So this installation in the short world building series is going to be all about monstering up your world. If you haven’t already, check out parts one and two of this series on world building, as this post references ideas in them. Those can be read here, and here. As with the previous posts (and future ones), this isn’t a definitive “how-to”. These are just my ideas and concepts for world building based on my experience over the years as a GM and DM.

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Lolth’s Lore Problem

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Lore is at much of the core of Dungeons & Dragons; it’s involved in shaping perceptions of the game, guides interactions with certain aspects of it, and is a big part of how the game is learned. The mechanics of the game may shift and change, but lore remains relatively consistent. Major events still occur in roughly the same ways and times from edition to edition, and monster lore persists even more strongly. So what happens when lore starts to be altered on a large scale, as in the case of the Elven Pantheon and the backstory of Lolth, as happened in the recent release of Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes?
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Fallout 76!

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Fallout 76. I know I’m supposed to be working on some Forgotten Realms stuff, but damn it! I love me some Fallout by Bethesda and Fallout 76 has my brain on fire. So this is a quick post about the trailer, and what it’s telling us about the world 20 years after the War and the world around Vault 76 in West Virginia. If you haven’t watched the E3 presentation yet, hit this up first:

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Plane Shift: Ixalan Review

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For some time now, on my radar but not fully explored, have been the Plane Shift products by Wizards of the Coast. The reason being that they were adaptations of the various worlds created for the Magic the Gathering CCG; and to be honest, I haven’t played that since Ice Age, so I wasn’t tracking much except that the game was still “a thing”. However, a combination of writing about Chult, Maztica, and looking into the Tales from the Yawning Portal has changed my online suggestions algorithm and kicked Plane Shift: Ixalan my way. Time for a new review!
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Tomb of Annihilation Additions: Adventurers League

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Last year I embarked on the most in-depth, detailed series of posts for this blog to date, as I dug into the Tomb of Annihilation campaign and sourcebook for 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. Thousands of words in, and with dozens of research hours burned, the end result was a three-part series which can be found here. At the end of it, a reader pointed out that in their experience with Adventurers League (AL) material, that some of the issues I had taken up were expanded on. While I stand fast on my DM Guild works position (they are not canon), AL is canon, and deserved a full examination with the same critical eye.
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