5th Edition: The Uninspired Bard

3rd Edition’s bard was a big bag of poorly designed suck: your attack bonus was too low to make you a competent fighter, your hit points were on par with a rogue (whom you also had fewer skill points than), and your spellcasting was, well, to put it nicely inadequate. Some mistakenly labeled is as a […]

Critical Failure: Insight

So Lair Assault happened last Monday. I had been prepared to continue The Elder Elemental Eye, but for the  first time in a long while new players showed up and they wanted to throw down against the Tyrantclaw, so against my better judgement I caved and decided to try my hand at murdering my players […]

Critical Failures: What Color Was That Dragon, Again?

This happened like, the session before we stopped running my first homebrew 4th Edition campaign over a year ago. I had gotten Player’s Handbook 2 months before and was itching to run something with a tight primal/Feywild/celtic theme. The main quest was that the players were searching for pieces of a song that had been written by […]

Critical Failures: So, You Had a Twin Sister

This is just a story about something that a player did–or rather, did not do–during one of my campaigns that we still bring up from time to time. About a year ago I had started running a campaign set in Eberron’s Shadow Marches, which relied heavily on aberrant cults gradually weakening Gatekeeper seals, raising sunken […]