Archaeology: Dwarf Class for 5E

I had been playing RPGs for many years before I ever even considered getting into homebrew. Of course, I wasn't against homebrew. I routinely took homemade gameable content from my favorite RPG blogs and put them into the games I was playing. But I just never wanted to make it myself, y'know?

Boy how things change.

It was around 2016 that I started dabbling in game design, but even then it was all confined to 2014 D&D 5E stuff. That's when I came up with my first dungeoncrawling procedure, Advanced Darkness, some rules for 4E-style minions, and started working on my rules for mazes (all of which were essential houserules to bolt onto your 5E game if you ever wanted to run my megadungeon, I assure you).

Around 2019 I was getting into the really retro stuff, especially Greyhawk, and wanted to try making a "race-as-class" hack for 5E. The idea was that Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, and Gnome would all be made into a full class, levels 1-20. Any PC of a different class would therefore be a human (and should still get the human traits at character creation, obviously). I had lots of notes about how I was planning to create each one, but the only one I made serious progress on was the Dwarf.

You want to take a look together?

Happy Birthday Knight at the Opera: 6 Years of Blogging

I started this blog 6 years ago. Here was the last retrospective. It contains the origin story and some badly-aged advice.

In the time since then, A Knight at the Opera has slowed down pretty significantly. Its best days are likely behind it. On average, I get a fraction of the views now compared to just two or three years ago. My own habits have gotten worse. I post less frequently. My drafts folder has grown to around 60 unfinished posts at any given time. I don't cut my post's length down nearly as much as I used to (although I also usually don't allow the first draft to get nearly so long to begin with. The average length of my posts has actually decreased over the years, believe it or not).

All the same, RPG blogging kind of took over my life, and it's brought me so many good things. I'm going to take a moment to talk about that, and a few other things.

Jim Henson's Labyrinth: the Adventure Game: A Scathingly Positive Review

[NOTE: I originally wrote this review back in 2023 as a guest post for Bones of Contention, a critic collective comprised of many of the best RPG bloggers out there. This review is a little old, but I stand by it!]

Jim Henson's Labyrinth: the Adventure Game is a self-contained system and adventure adapted from the 1986 film Labyrinth, published in 2019 by River Horse Games. The main creators behind it are the brothers Jack and Chris Caesar, but the adventure is mostly written by Ben Milton (AKA Questing Beast). The book is 294 pages and uses the original concept artwork for the movie by Brian Froud, with additional artwork by Ralph Horsley and Johnny Fraser-Allen.

I own the PDF of the game and am currently running it for the second time, both campaigns using Discord voice+text and Roll20 as a VTT. As probably indicated by the fact that I'm running it again, I am a big fan. Short review: 10/10, quite likely the finest experience I've ever had using published RPG material at my table. But this book already has a lot of positive reviews, and I felt like it might be worth it to spotlight some of the qualities that I haven't seen discussed in those. The things which I didn't really discover until I played it myself.

[By the way, the artwork in this post was done by my friend Norn, a groovy firey whose face was stolen by the Goblin King. You can find their stuff and contact them about commissions at norn-noszka.com]

Appendix T&T

This post is part of the "Appendix N" blog bandwagon. I decided to share some of the many influences that have shaped a game I've been working on for a few years called Tricks & Treats.

It's a game about having spooky adventures on Halloween. You roleplay as kids and teenagers celebrating the best holiday ever, taking advantage of a rare night of unsupervised freedom, navigating the complex and unforgiving social landscape of adolescence, and investigating a mysterious horror that needs to be thwarted in order to save the day.

It's built for one-shot mini-sandbox scenarios, each one revolving around a major Halloween activity (trick-or-treating, going to a haunted house, attending a costume party, etc.). They always prominently feature a cast of NPCs thoroughly stocked with conflicts, rumors, and various hooks, and a unique "puzzle monster" that can't be defeated without gathering clues and forming a clever strategy.

There are many obvious cultural touchstones that you can connect to this game. You might expect the Appendix N to include things like Goosebumps, Hocus Pocus, The Monster Squad, The Goonies, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, etc. Maybe even adult horror like IT and Halloween. And like, sure. Those things are all part of this game. But they weren't part of what I personally put into it.

That's what this post is about. If someone playing it says "wow this is really giving Scooby Doo" or "I'm getting big Over the Garden Wall vibes from this" then that's awesome. By all means, bring those influences to it when you play. But those aren't my influences. These works are.

How Do You Handle the "Inside" of a Hex? (George Lucas Special Edition)

[Context for this post: this is a re-write of an old post of mine I wrote back in 2021. I wasn't happy with my explanation, and it's filled with errors, but people link to it frequently anyway. Please update your links to this version, instead.]

I have noticed an unspoken disparity in the way people seem to use hexes in the context of a hexcrawl, and I think it deserves some attention. That is: do you bother with precision in the movement that takes place within a hex OR do you treat the space within them as fairly nebulous and concern yourself only with the movement between hexes?

This is a surprisingly complex topic.

L Monsters at the Opera

A B C D Demon Dragon E F G1 G2 G3 H I Jackalwere K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Credit: Mike Mignola

Hey, happy 200th post, Knight at the Opera. Now let's populate this digital megadungeon with some L monsters.

K Monsters at the Opera

A B C D Demon Dragon E F G1 G2 G3 H I Jackalwere K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Credit: Richard Whitters

K monsters are all plundered from various cultures around the world, perhaps outside the "default" medieval England / France milieu popular high fantasy normally anchors itself within. Anywhere from Japan and China to Germany and Norway to... uh, Atlantis?