4e: The Dragonborn
July 21, 2020 You may remember a while ago I talked about how, typically, in fantasy stories, dragons are used to represent governments. This idea isn’t like, hard codified facts or anything, it’s just a way to look at dragons and it can make some sense of how they behave when they’re used in stories. […]
The Points of Light
Recent conversations about racism in D&D- Oh yeah, uh This isn’t going to be about that. That’s a pretty heavy thing. This is a light one. Anyway, recent conversations about racism in D&D got me thinking about how rarely I saw the flavour text for Orcs and Drow. They’re there, in the monster manual, and […]
4e Power Sources
Back in the olden days of Fourth Edition, we would cast our minds back to the even oldener days of Third Edition and the slightly less oldener days of Third Point Fifth Edition, all of which predates Fifth Edition, about which, I want to underscore, and reiterate, because I keep having to do this, I know […]
Oaths, Pacts and The Moral Failure of Trying
A lot of D&D players view their D&D world like they’re a bunch of cowards. There are two classes in the general ouvre of D&D who spend their lives in pursuit of a goal, having committed themselves to the will of something outside of themselves to have power enough to achieve it. One of them […]
Claw Gloves
4th Edition D&D is, like all editions of D&D, very much invested in the physical stuff your character carries around. I’ve talked about this in the past, where D&D finds it easier to use material objects to give you preposterous abilities, even though it’s ostensibly a game about wizards with preposterous abilities. In 4th edition, […]
Half-Elves (But really Elves)
My earlier treatment of Orcs in Cobrin’Seil was intended, at first, to be a comprehensive examination of the half races. Elves and orcs and humans, the big three that show up in most of the editions of D&D’s player handbooks and most of the settings for them. As I did this though I realised that […]
Half-Orcs (but really Orcs)
I have these in my D&D setting, and I have them because, removed from any ontological questions, they are cool things. An orc is like a human, but bigger and usually more physically brawny, and green, and being able to play a half-orc means you have a bunch of outcaster cred, you get to play […]
Being The Monster: 5 Horrible 4e Heroes
Everyone I know has some hypothetical interest at the very least in playing a hot monster in their local tabletop game. I am willing to recognise that this is a selection bias, possibly due to the overwhelming presence of the queer monsterfuckers in my social circle, but the long and short of it is that […]
Five Reasons You Should Try Running 4e
Typically when these edition conversations come up, I come at it with a certain kind of defensiveness. This is in part conciliatory – after all, I don’t think the conversation is useful if it’s about whether or not you should play 5e or 4e (or 3e, or Pathfinder, or whatever). It’s not useful, because I […]
D&D Memories: Adon
If people keep reading these I guess I’m gunna keep posting them. Okay, so one night we sat down to play D&D and I had to admit that I was kinda tapped out and didn’t have a campaign to start up straight after one I finished. That’s how it went, I think – this detail […]