Author Archives: mattwandcow

Pendragon Appendix N: Works that inspire me towards Arthurian Roleplay

The Pendragon RPG contains its own list of references, but I’m not quite cultured enough to recognize all of these actual historic references. So instead of that, I’m making up a list of everything I thought of as something to read or watch as I was reading the RPG.

Experiment of Dread: Playing a Hexcrawl in 5e

This last weekend, I met online with some friends to do some D&D. As per. However, not all of our group were able to gather, so I placed the current storyline on hold and ran Something Else. And since Module X1, the Isle of Dread has been on my mind, I decided to run that […]

Pendragon RPG: 9 things that excite me, 5 things that scare me

I learned about an old RPG recently. The first edition of it was released in 1985, so it’s been around longer than me. I got my book for it this week, and I’m playing fast catch up. I really want to add it to my repertoire, but it’s very different than D&D (or at least, […]

More thoughts On Palace of the Silver Princess

I sat down on Wednesday morning to prep the game for that night. I started with the map of what I had presented so far, then started drawing a new map to extend the dungeon. And stopped instantly. “Why are these rooms here, like this? It doesn’t make sense!” was my thought.  So I ran […]

D&D Archeology: Using old material for the first time

I like to call myself a D&D Archaeologist. I love buying old books and seeing what secrets the ancients had in their games. By ancients, yes, I refer to earlier editions of D&D, but also any game. I’m not picky about where the sources of interesting ideas come from.

BOFURI x D&D: Thoughts on Pacing

There’s an anime releasing called BOFURI. It’s an Isekai of sorts, set inside a full dive VR video game, but people are just playing, nothing at stake. I just watched episode 8 and I figured out what was rubbing me wrong about the show. (I do recommend the first few episodes. After that, it’s on […]

The King’s Clash: Things Matt figured out while arranging a tournament in D&D

So when I started getting the characters stories for Eberron in, one of my players mentioned he worked in the fighting pits and arenas of Sharn, I knew I was going to have to do some stuff with pit fights. My slight disillusionment with downtime in regards to PCs simulating a day to day existence […]

Overthinking Eberron: Dragonvale Mental Hospital

I read a book recently, that brought to life the mental effects that 4 years of brutal war could have on people. And the whole time I was thinking, man, Eberron has had a hundred years of war that only became more and more brutal. What would their mental hospitals be like?