The ideal level of abstraction and prep for a D&D dungeon is a graph that looks like this:

My personal D&D goblin lore is that most of their whole deal can be explained by the fact that they have a LOT of children, mature at about twice the rate as humans, and have about half the lifespan (if they live that long, which is rare), so they’re essentially to humans what humans are to elves.

Elves look at humans as unpredictable and hot tempered and violent and childish, and humans think the same things about goblins.

Prussia Enters The Chat

In the early 1800’s, Prussian nerds got involved in das taktische kriegsspiel.

pictured: Prussian nerd.

The Default Fantasy Genre doesn’t always do it for me.

So, I asked ChatGPT to take my character designs for my D&D players out of my cartoony style and re-render them in a more painterly fantasy style, and honestly it’s… pretty good.

Here are my drawings:

And the results:

Not perfect but a darn sight better than I could do.

I found this in my D&D session notes and I think it’s quite good

So, I made a dungeons and dragons mistake.

There’s some DMing advice that I adhere to pretty closely, when you’re characterizing an NPC or a group of NPCs, you can kinda just file the serial numbers off of something you’re already very familiar with and run with it.

I’m not that experienced with “organized crime”, haven’t watched anything conteporary so, in our Dragon Heist campaign, I decided that a good analogue for the Zhentarim would be “the mafia, specifically from the movie The Godfather”.

The problem, though…

It was a fun characterization. It added a lot of depth and interest to the local Zhentarim. They’re not good, but they’re honorable, they have a code. And if you’re good to them? They’ll be good, reliable allies.

This went over entirely too well, this was the first major Waterdeep faction my players encountered, and whoops, my players are just fully aligned with the Zhentarim now.

I mean, the players are good, there were lots of local “good” factions, but the local Zhents, with their friendly, accessible low-rent evil - well, it’s just hard to say no to them. They keep making offers my players can’t refuse. Players don’t mind paying a little protection money or shaking up some locals now and again. A quest is a quest, even if it’s to intimidate a potential witness.

Their capo, Urstul Floxin, his “friendly and helpful in a very threatening way” shtick, is actually very convincing. The person who keeps talking the party into doing shady stuff is ME, actually.

I love how even in the D&D art provided by Wizard of the Coast he kinda looks like Luca Brasi.

I don’t think this is really even a problem: Waterdeep Dragon Heist is a heist story where the players operate a tavern, the players are naturally going to find themselves way more aligned with local organized crime than the constabulary.

ed: Months later, Urstul has provided the players with their own goons, Guido and Nunzio, a little dumb one and a big gentle one, and they’re already productively contributing to schemes and nonsense.

after a three hour session in the Goblin Mine, the players finally encounter a great Oak tree, the acorns of which have magical healing properties

and reluctantly, frustratedly, irritatedly add the “Goblin Mine Nuts” to their inventory right next to the pelt of the Huge Buttfor

the whole Dungeons and Dragons community seems to be angry about the idea of fudging dice, but I for one think that it should be encouraged

Minute five of your Dungeons and Dragons adventure:

the morning dew rolls down the heavy brick walls of this lushly appointed manor, bedecked in rich earth tones to indicate its allegiance with the Shah of Dust, the air rich with the aromas of spice and sweat

Minute one-hundred and eighty of your adventure:

this room has a chest in it

I would sometimes make fun of video games for just leaving expository diaries all over the place but now that I’ve been running a Dungeons and Dragons campaign of my own for a while my players are just ass-deep in found journals.

look, I’m not going to lie, I will fully admit that it is not in character for the Big Bad to just chronicle his evil plans in big bold letters in a little book that he keeps on his person and frequently misplaces but sometimes I’m just at a loss for how to continue

(you need to unambiguously point players to the next major location in the story)

uh,

uh

okay, so, uh… on the goblin chieftain’s dead body you find a tattered journal written in a childish hand

if y’all have great ways to deliver clear, diegetic exposition in the context of dungeons and also dragons, please

“as you stab the gelatinous cube a partially digested adventurer’s journal pops out”

bard: i cast suggestion, the instruction is “go stand near the side of the boat”

monk:

so, I’m invited to participate in this pirate-themed low-level D&D one shot set on a boat, and I think to myself “what’s a solid low-effort build for solving boat problems” and I go with a Way of the Open Palm because boats is small and a 15ft push is a lot of push, then I spend most of my session yeeting various monsters into the water.

at one point the DM intervened with some Deus Ex Machina because I fully launched his big bad off of the side of the ship with a lucky roll

yesterday my D&D players got to explore a cemetery where every single headstone was a “Here lies Bob, who drowned”-tier stupid pun

“Here lies Wayne, died in a stowm”

“Here lies Thereese, who had diseese”

here’s the full list:

• Here lies Will, who left no inheritance
• Here lies Rob, who was mugged
• Here lies Taylor, who seamed alive
• Here lies Pat, touch his grave for luck
• Here lies Ty, roped into this whole business
• Here lies Phil, accidentally buried alive
• Here lies Barry, who killed Phil on accident
• Here lies Doug, who helped Barry
• Here lies Dawn, her husband mourning
• Here lies Locke, a man with a secret
• Here lies Eileen, who stood up against injustice
• Here lies Frank, who, honestly, was just the worst
• Here lies Deforest, who died in de city
• Here lies Wayne, died in a storm
• Here lies Bea, allergic to honey
• Here lies Chuck, thrown by a horse
• Here lies Peg, who fell into a round hole
• Here lies Mary, killed by her husband
• Here lies Bill; exploded still
• Here lies Therese, who had diseese
• Here lies Rowan, who loved his boat
• Here lies Lance, from infected boil
• Here lies Grant, who gave generously
• Here lies Liv, who died
• Here lies Carol, who’s sung her last note
• Here lies Aiden, helpful to the end
• Here lies Kent, who, in fact, could
• Here lies Paige, who took a turn for the worse
• Here lies Reid, clarinet-maker
• Here lies Kerry, pall-bearer
• Here lies Sue, famous lawyer
• Here lies Pierce, who took an arrow
• Here lies Nick, his throat was slit
• Here lies Chase, killed by a pack of wild dogs
• Here lies Mark, who died protecting his brand
• Here lies Bob, who drowned

My wife and I are both digital artists - although she is a professional, whereas I’m more of an amateur, so on the top is her version of her D&D character (Mr. Buns) and on the bottom is my version.

(please do not choose a favorite, it’s bound to lead to one of us feeling bad, and by one of us I mean definitely me)

She’s a background painter, so her work tends more towards definition and detail, whereas I’m more of a cartoonist, so mine tends towards dynamic pose and relative simplicity

I joked that hers is the theatrical release and mine is the direct-to-DVD remake

tiff: so, it’s a little girl with a giant warforged bunny barbarian guardian

curtis: … so you want to play as The Maxx?

tiff: >_>

tiff: <_<

my friends are going to be very frustrated when they get to the end of the campaign and learn that the real Strahd was the friends they made along the way

there’s a bard spell called viscous mockery which they cast when the words aren’t flowing as well as usual

I gave my players a scroll of Pyrotechnics, one of the less useful spells in the game (IMO) figuring that if they ever figured out something to use it for, it would be fun.

Anyhow, one unexpected effect, Rules as Written, is that the spell starts by extinguishing a 5x5 cube of fire, (which would, IMO, insta-kill a CR 5 Fire Elemental) and which the players used to solve a “fire” problem they were having. The fireworks afterward were just incidental.

my Dungeons & Dragons crew now have a running joke because every time they ask a time based question I mime looking at my watch

but watches are not common in the D&D universe, and also the time frames are never appropriate for a watch-look anyways

“how many months ago was that?”

gregnor the wizard: (looks at his watch) uh… 3 months

this is a weird habit I have in real life, someone will ask if I’m free, like, three weeks from now, and the first thing I’ll check is my watch, even if , having performed this little dance, the watch provides no information to me that is useful for that transaction

at a loss for D&D encounter ideas, I have just created a Shrek room

Your path is blocked! Can you defeat the giant monster, brave adventurers?

Lo, the monster has been defeated with ear rubs

someone wants to join my D&D game as a “deckromancer”, which is to say, a druid who specializes in carpentry

2025 Editor’s Note: he was a perfect simulation of a contractor, which is to say, he didn’t show up even one time

Somebody has a white Tesla with vanity plates that read “ASMARA” and my first instinct was “sucks to your asmara, piggy”

This is also how I feel about D&D’s aasimar.

one of my Dungeons and Dragons players is very excited that they own a tavern and took all of these pictures of my handouts

me, just before bed last night: I have to write this D&D idea down so that I don’t forget it

this morning: “Horace Mann, guy who really wants to tell you that he owns a mustang?”

editor’s note: horace mann later died, also, the players stole his horse

A running joke in my Blades in the Dark campaign was that the players kept running into in-universe nerds who were obsessed with a clown-themed wargame called “Clownhammer 40K”

anyways I’m currently working on a part of my D&D campaign and I found a spot to insert “Clownhammer” (but original fantasy clownhammer obviously)

This is primarily a cat posting account with periodic breaks for everything else I do

you walk into a clearing, roll for initiative

This Waterdeep campaign has a sewer section and I can’t find any reddit thread about it that doesn’t at least mention the possibility of running in to four martially competent tortles and a wererat.

yeah, I make my own custom cards

I’m running “Waterdeep: Dragon Heist” for my friends, in D&D, right now.

Based on some back of the envelope math, fixing up the tavern in Trollskull alley in Waterdeep would take about 8.5 in-game years to justify the expense involved in renovating and licensing it.

The operating expenses are so high in Waterdeep and the benefits of running a business are so low in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, that the expected return is a whopping 4gp a week: given that it takes 1250gp to get the place up and running, so I feel like there may be some justification to house rule it so that fixing up the tavern isn’t a terrible, terrible idea.

Like: our players long rest about once per session, sometimes once every two sessions, and we average about three sessions a month, so the Tavern, rules-as-written, produces about 2gp per real life human month. At that rate, none of us will live to see the tavern pay itself off: it’s just a useless money-sink for the players.

Fixing this (so that the tavern isn’t a waste of time) will depend on how often you play D&D with your friends and how quickly time advances in your own campaigns.

If you quadruple the output of successful rolls, the place pays itself off in only 17 weeks, which is within the realm of possibility for the game, and it also makes the rolls feel much weightier: on a critical tavern success you can make hundreds of gp in a week.

Anything that gives the players a +10 bonus on the Tavern Roll is worth ~35gp, which you can do a bunch of times, like, 7 or 8 times and have it still pay off for the players. If they do something heroic enough that people want to talk about it or think of a clever way to improve business to the tavern? A temporary +10 to the Tavern roll, sure.

If they’re regularly, actively adding a bunch of +10s to their Tav rolls under this system through Gameplay, they could have the place paid off in ~4 in-game weeks.

“What if my players get so obsessed with optimizing their tavern operations that they don’t spend any time adventuring” well I guess we’re playing co-op SimTavern now, so long as they’re having fun it’s cool by me.

That still might be too slow, though, a “week” in the game is 10 days, that’s 10 full long rests, if you think of a session as maybe containing one, maybe two long rests, it could take a whiiiiile.

We can also make this much faster by rolling on the table Every Day rather than Every Week. More fun: a roll on every long rest. This lowers the expected value of the roll to 31gp a day (the bonus of the roll is determined by how many days between rolls), but it just means they’ve gotta hustle on those +10 bonuses more.

If they’re doing about three heroic or tavern-friendly things per long rest, that has the place paid off in 8-9 long rests, which is much closer to where I’d want it to be.

Keep in mind if we assume that our players long rest about every 2 hours, we play about 4 hours a month, that means that the tavern is profitable in about 4 real life human months.

Now we just set our tavern maintenance cost to 6gp/day aaand:

Editor’s Note: years later and this tavern has been reliably churning out money for the players. It feels satisfying, I think I picked good numbers here, and I’m still not entirely certain if the tavern’s high cost of opening has been fully paid off (we had one very long night that took a few months to resolve), but it’s fine.

in D&D, you build encounters using monsters’ “challenge rating”

deer have a “challenge rating” of 0, so you could create a challenging and well-balanced encounter for a level one party:

one billion deer