Dragon of Icespire Peak
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At the time the events of Dragon of Icespire Peak take place, there are/were twenty-two rock gnome recluses residing in the caves of Gnomengarde (RIP Orryn & Warryn). There are eleven 40-gallon barrels of wine in Gnomengarde’s wine alcoves (area 8). The map of Gnomengarde shows twelve barrels, but one of them is not as…
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Continuing my thoughts from yesterday about it being a mini-Khazad-dûm, one thing that always stood out to me about the Axeholm quest in Dragon of Icespire Peak is the lack of tone-setting to help build tension for what the characters are walking into. Yes, the Dwarven ruin is briefly (and nicely) described as “a dark,…
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When I was a kid, I had a friend whose brother kept a shoe box full of fingernail and toenail clippings beneath his bed. I always found that absurd, because I thought they were his fingernail and toenail clippings. Now that I’m older, wiser, and have read a few Player’s Handbooks, I’m not so certain.…
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Trinkets don’t get enough love. Players can choose one from the list in the Player’s Handbook at character creation, but if/when they do select a trinket, the player doesn’t know what to do with it, so it just just becomes some forlorn item on a character sheet for most people. To me, trinkets are a…
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There be dragons in Lost Mine of Phandelver and Dragon of Icespire Peak – and they’re often accompanied by grumbling Dungeon Masters, fretting over how encounters with Venomfang and Cryovain are unbalanced. There’s actually some really good advice on encounters with dragons in The Rise of Tiamat, which came out four months after Lost Mine…
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Doipify your El Mop?! Is that a verbal spell component? No, silly. Doip (DOIP: Dragon of Icespire Peak) ify your El Mop (LMOP: Lost Mine of Phandelver). In other words, remove the linear story from Lost Mine of Phandalin, and make it more open-ended like Dragon of Icespire Peak. I realize I could have just…