Dragons of the Great Game

This is one of my all-time favorite pieces of fluff in D&D history, but is, unfortunately, almost completely lost to history. Maybe someone reading this will give it another look.

In the days of 3rd Edition D&D, there was a lot of content bloat. In just eight years they came out with five monster manuals, each filled with several hundred new baddies for you to use. They were mostly garbage, aiming for quantity over quality every step of the way. By Monster Manual III, nearly every page had a goofy, ridiculous concept someone pulled from their ass in desperation to sell more books. But all of them contained nuggets of gold, if you scoured through them. The Monster Manual V was the most ignored of all, coming out near the end of the 3rd edition life cycle. Right when everyone was looking forward to 4th edition or, at the very least, already had plenty of monsters to use. But this monster I want to talk about wasn’t really something that you needed the stat block for. This was an idea.

The gist: dragons have a favorite board game they play, and it can make for the coolest campaign ever.

Medieval Halflings: Pechs, Not Hobbits

Unacceptable

Brilliant

Of the core D&D races, halflings are the ones I think the least about. That’s probably true for many people. I think they’re delightful, don’t get me wrong. I think the 5th Edition art for them, where they have giant bloated heads, is hysterical and great. I think anyone defending the freak alien 3rd Edition ones is pretentious and ridiculous. But… I would like for these to be something that can be taken seriously. That is, after all, why I revisited gnomes. So I want halflings that I’m happy with and manage to be fairly vanilla while also different than what we’re normally given. I originally envisioned this looking similar to the gnome or dwarf posts I made, but as you can see, I had some complicated thought processes I think may be of value to share. But the list of halfling traits I made is in the second half.