Things are finally starting to warm up in the north, meaning the snow is just about gone and I’m able to sit on my back deck again. We’re in that sweet spot between winter and bugs, and I’m taking full advantage of it.
It’s awesome my job recognizes WrestleMania as the universal centre of the wrestling world, and I’ve gotten a few days off work disguised as something called “Easter”… I have no idea what that is, but I imagine it’s just a fancy non-English word for WRESTLEMANIA BAYYYYY BEEEEEE.
So anyway, with four days off, I’ve had a chance to really dig into some of my catch-up work in terms of my 5e adventures. I’m expecting some proof copies of “The Crypt of the Four” from Amazon early next week, and my second installment of The Amberblight Quintet is in the books. I’ll be putting it up on Dungeon Master’s Guild in the next few days, but if you are waiting for a paper copy, I’ll probably have that ready to go on Amazon next week sometime.
So that’s good news! It means I’ll be working on some new adventures soon. I’ve been paying my daughter to colour some of the many, many Dyson Logos maps I bought commercial licenses for, and she’s decided to use that money to get shots for her dog. As you can imagine, that means I have a pile of them just waiting for something to come and take them over.
My reprint of “A Quiet Place” is in the middle of a soft release; I’m trying to line up some conventions for this year to get out and meet people and hawk my wares. I DO have a ticket for When Words Collide in Calgary in August, so at the very least, if you are headed that way, stop by and say hi! If I’m not checking out a panel, I will likely be in the pub. Writers write, and when they aren’t writing, they are usually drinking.
My plan here is to have each of these adventures include their own capstone feature that will make them feel very different from the other adventures in the series, while retaining the storyline and driving toward the ultimate goal. This means these adventures will all be very different from one another and may include mechanics you have never seen before in D&D 5e. I’m a homebrew addict from way, way, WAY back, and I can’t resist a chance to twist and mutate the rules. If you’ve played some of my other adventures, you might have a bit of an idea what I mean.
In Amberblight, the players are introduced to a sleepy little town known as Riverrock. The Town is a place where dwarves and humans live together peacefully. Of course, that is about to change, because if it didn’t, well, we wouldn’t really have an adventure, would we?
Here is the teaser for Amberblight:
Riverrock’s peaceful days are over. Villagers vanish, livestock roam strangely, and whispers of glowing veins in the hills spread like wildfire. Deep within the abandoned dwarven outpost of Rockshield, an ancient amber vein pulsates with life, harbouring grotesque parasites and an artifact of elven origin. As the corruption spreads, twisted creatures crawl from the depths. Will your party face the hive’s horrors and unravel its secrets… or fall to the amber’s insidious grasp?
Hang on to your butts, kids, it’s gonna be a ride.
My two shorter, earlier adventures, The Den and The Changelings, are about to be in print. The Den actually is in print on Amazon as we speak, laid out similar to the digital designs found on the Dungeon Masters Guild, but in that handy little 6X9 format. I’ve priced them lower than The Tower at the End of Time due to the size difference in the books – both are around 30 pages while Tower is 70.
Both The Den and The Changelings are rebuilds from my Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign and when I originally ran them, my players worked through in about 4 hours. I thought the same would be said for Tower, but they ended up doing that adventure over two nights and wrapping up one outstanding issue on the third night.
I have a couple more of these to do, The Crypt of The Four and The Temple of the Shrike, and then I should be all caught up in terms of digital adventures heading to print. In the future, I may launch print and digital adventures together.
Some news on that “Glimmering Plague” trilogy I was working on – It has expanded into a Quintet. Honestly, I get lost in these things sometimes. I was motoring along and suddenly hit 50 pages and realized I was only halfway through what I had planned. So after talking it over with a pal (and I seriously know two of the greatest D&D minds out there), He suggested a quintet might be in order. Yeah, why not? Maybe I’ll release it as five individual adventures as well as one big one. Could be around 200 pages of content by the time it is done. Hardcover? Maybe. I have to write the damn things first.
I have an interview coming up with the local paper – it was an easy pitch, since the reporter is a friend of mine. He’s always looking for good community news stories. And I mean, I do live in the community.
I’ve started transforming my digital adventures into print copies on Amazon through their KDP platform. I’m experimenting with a more compact format – 6×9, which isn’t really a Dungeons and Dragons size (unless you include those amazing Volo guidebooks from 2e) but it IS a size that is commonly used by other games in the industry.
I like smaller books, and I’ve now done a couple of these adventures in this format and really like how they are turning out. Glossy covers and premium colour pages aren’t cheap, however, so the price is just a bit higher than I would like it to be. Hopefully that won’t deter folks from checking them out, we’re still talking a night or two worth of entertainment for less than a pizza.
The smaller page size resulted in additional pages – the print version of the Tower at the End of Time is 70 pages compared to about 48 for the version you can get on the DMs Guild.
I’ve got a first order in so hopefully we will start seeing them pop up around the north, and if you see me with a table at a convention this year, I should have lots of copies for sale.
You can find The Tower at the End of Time on Amazon:
My latest adventure up at Dungeon Masters Guild is a level 20 horror adventure called The Tower at the End if Time. I originally wrote it in 2024 for my annual Halloween Horror one shot.
At the time, we were coming to the end of our two-year Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign, and this sidetrek was a Ravenloft story with a few small changes. Most of the original story remains intact.
This adventure actually took two sessions to complete, as I didn’t anticipate my players getting lost in the labyrinth for as long as they did. I’ve changed some of the mechanics in this version with that in mind.
Adventuring at level 20
It’s pretty common wisdom among DMs that high level play is difficult to run. The players are basically demigods at this point, they never miss, nobody saves, and the amount of damage they can put out in a round is pretty staggering.
For my players, an illusionist wizard, an elven archer (fighter), paladin, rogue, and light cleric, they could put out anywhere from 75-200 points of damage each. Every round. EVERY. ROUND. Think about that range. an enemy with 400 hp could last 5-6 rounds or two rounds, depending on the luck of the dice. This makes combat very swingy in late stage play.
I noticed pretty quickly that adding HP was not the right answer here. The rounds can be agonizingly slow at this stage. Players with multiple effects, abilities, and turns. You have to account for a little bit of time for the players to still be weighing their strategies by the time it gets around to their turn.
And I know there is a lot of discussion out there about using minions, attacking player weaknesses, complicating combat – and yeah, those all have a place in your toolbox. They are just not the right tool every time. A lich will definitely be strategic about their attacks, but a giant purple worm? Nawwwwww.
My answer was to beef up the damage. Make combat even MORE lethal. Sure, they were going to paste my monsters in 1-2 rounds, but man, were they going to pay for letting me have a turn! And this seemed to add a level of panic to player actions. Drop 120 points of damage onto a paladin from a single arrow in the first round, and watch your players scurry for cover. It’s great fun. And the irony here is that this amount of damage was not far off from what my players were able to do themselves. Sauce for the goose.
Who Watches the Watchers? (Hint… it’s the players)
Circling back to The Tower at the Edge of Time, the adventure added a fun little bonus in the form of phantasmal creatures known as The Watchers. The Watchers do exactly as their name implies. They watch. Their only purpose in the adventure is to be there to witness the undoing of Creation with the release of Zar’Vul – an ancient god of unknown and forgotten things. Like I said, the stakes at level 20 are just that much higher, right?
I had a note in my original story about how The Watchers only watch The Obsidian Tower, unless a player commits an evil act in their presence or casts a necromantic or far-realm based spell (something I was using as “forgotten lore”). So of course, my Illusionist cast one of these spells, and was horrified to find one of The Watchers turn and look at him. That Watcher followed him through the adventure right up until the very end, when they returned back to the ruined Netherese city of Ythryn in Icewind Dale.
At this point, my Illusionist immediately asked, “Did that Watcher follow me home?”
I didn’t have any notes on this. I hadn’t really thought about it. But, generally being a “Yes, and!” DM, I immediately said, “Yes, and…” The “and” part was that The Watcher stayed with him for the rest of the campaign and into retirement. And my Illusionist tried EVERYTHING he could to rid himself of this creature. It never interacted, but anytime he looked out across the land, he would see a lone, robed figure standing off, watching him. Sometimes The Watcher was just a spec on the horizon. Sometimes it stood beside the table while my player sat in an inn trying to eat soup in peace.
After our campaign wound down, I asked the players where they saw their character a year after their adventure. It was part of an end of campaign session I learned about from Mike Shea of Sly Flourish fame. It’s a great idea, and if you don’t do this, you really should consider it!
The Watchers appear in this version of the adventure in the form they evolved into in that original Halloween game. Anytime they witness an act or spell that leaves a “taint” on a player’s soul, they will gain a new Watcher.
Forever.
Promo stuff
Here is the product teaser and promo video for The Tower at the End of Time. It’s about 42 pages long, so I’ve priced it a bit higher than my usual $2.99 USD for these. adventures – it’s priced at $4.99 USD. This just reflects the extra work that went into it. I hope this doesn’t dissuade you from dropping a couple bucks on it.
Not because it is forbidden, but because it was never known. The Tower stands at the edge of memory, waiting for those who were never meant to find it. Beyond its threshold lies a presence that should not exist, a being neither alive nor dead—only absent.
Step forward, and the world may change around you. Turn back, and you will always wonder what was waiting beyond the door.
Some things are meant to be forgotten.
But something is calling you to remember.
Before you go any further, read this!!!
This adventure contains themes of existential horror, reality manipulation, memory loss, and the unraveling of time. Players may also encounter themes of identity erasure, non-linear causality, and the consequences of altering fundamental truths. Readers and players should be aware that this is a story of inevitability and consequence, where choices shape the world in ways that cannot be undone. For some of you, this is exactly why you have purchased this adventure. For others…
A trailer I made up this weekend for my 5e adventure, “The Changelings”, available now on the DMsGuild. Check it out!
A Storm is brewing, and something hungry is here…
Weeks of relentless storms have drenched the region, but the true danger lies beneath the surface. Deep in the woods, a forgotten megalith, once used for blasphemous rituals to an ancient, otherworldly being, has suddenly reactivated.
Lightning has pierced the veil between worlds, unleashing ghastly creatures from the far realm.
Now, the idyllic village of Applewood is under siege. The creatures are infiltrating, wearing the flayed skins of their victims and mimicking their lives. As fear grips the villagers, can anyone uncover the horrifying truth before it’s too late?
Enter the storm, unmask the terror, and face the unspeakable…
A Horror Story for levels 1-3
Before you go any further, read this!!! This adventure contains graphic depictions of violence, body horror, flaying, cannibalism, and themes of identity loss and infiltration. It also includes elements of psychological horror, murder, and unsettling depictions of otherworldly creatures. For some of you, this is exactly why you have purchased this adventure. For others… YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
I play in a couple D&D games; one weekly and one bi-weekly.
In one of my games, I’ve been playing a dwarf paladin destined to be a paladin of Moradin from the awesome Faiths of the Forgotten Realms book. And everything was progressing along nicely.
At level 2, I’ve been roleplaying little events in the game that are pointing towards his intended path. Intended, that is, until we visited a small town overrun with squid creatures from the Far Realm. Kade (Orcsplitter, in the finest Dwarven tradition) managed to get himself a parasitic squid parasite living in his head and spinal column. In a moment, he was turned from the hammer and anvil.
Later, when the party wizards and a handful of scraggily bandits managed to free everyone, Kade traded in his hammer for a battle axe. Filled with rage, he is now in the process of walking down and dismantling every infested squid-slave he can get his paws on. To the shock and dismay of some of my party members, of course.
The axe, the rage, the uncompromising judgement – they are all part of a plan that suddenly occurred to me while I was wandering around happily being a parasitic host and worshipping some old farming god. I was no longer going to be a paladin of Moradin. Instead, my experience has turned me toward a path of Vengeance. No longer would I be the hammer of justice for my god. I would be the clenched fist that wields it.
Now the real story begins. because as he is adventuring in these early levels, he is forming as a character. I’m getting a better sense of who he is and what he wants to accomplish. I’m getting to know what he likes and what he hates. And I’ve discovered that prior to level 3, “I haven’t taken my oath yet!” is a great way to shut down any criticism about Kade’s methods.
Sure, D&D is a game about rolling dice and collecting treasure. But where it truly shines, and will always shine, is as a group storytelling exercise. In my mind, the best way to do this is to live the world as your character.
Think about how your character might respond to things that are happening to them and around them. THAT is your real back story. Your background is just the bones. The meat, blood, skin, and organs grow out of those early levels.
Work stuff:
I recently heard back from the editors of a story I subbed back in October, and it turns out they liked it enough that they want to add it to their anthology. Great news! It’s always exciting to get that kind of information in your inbox. It helps that these editors are great people and very talented, and they live in my neck of the woods (internationally speaking).
I also heard back from a second place I had subbed to, and they let me know they would not be taking the story I sent them. I still have hope for this one. This is the second market it’s been turned down from, so we are still in single digits. I’m still optimistic, in other words.
I haven’t released a new adventure in a couple weeks, but I have a handful of them sitting at the moment waiting for a couple final pieces. I’m working on a process to get my maps coloured, because that would be more cool. Good work takes time (and money).
I’ll post an image from my latest WiP, a near perfect reconstruction of a Halloween adventure I ran for my 2-year Rime group. Perfect, as in it is almost exactly how I ran it back then. You’ll have to decide for yourself if it’s any good 😉
I finished up a new adventure over the weekend and submitted a story to an open call anthology. I’ve been on a bit of a folk horror kick lately, so there will probably be a few more in me over the next few months.
Anyway, this new adventure is called the Temple of the Shrike. Shrikes, as you may know are little birds with an awesome tendency to impale their food on thorns so they can save it for later. Butcherbirds. There was a time in my life when I didn’t know these birds existed, and my world was poorer for it. Slowly, from that seed, grew a story idea.
I’ll try to explain some of this without spoiling it, in case you want to hop over to DMs Guild and grab a copy for yourself. My adventures are cheap – I’d rather people were playing them than make money off them.
So let’s start with a village on the edge of a large forest. And the village is really just a group of homesteaders whose ancestors threw their lots in together and made a go of things. Hundreds of years ago. And things were good, for most of those years. But now, things are not going so well.
The crops are spoiling, animals are being dragged off in the night, and thorny vines have begun taking over the old outbuildings on the edge of town. Everything is pointing to the woods just outside the village.
This is where the adventurers come in. It’s a straight forward mystery/save the village/go fight a big bad and collect some treasure.
At least, it seems like that at first. As they poke about, things start to look a little slanted. after a while, the players may start to wonder what side of this they are actually on.
I’m happy with how this adventure turned out because it highlights two things I love to do in D&D. First, I am a huge fan of turning things that shouldn’t be monsters into monsters, and finding good reasons for them to do so. A lot of my horror fiction deals with good people suffering under the yoke of whatever bullshit the universe throws at them. This bleeds into my D&D adventures as well. I think the world not giving a damn about you is kind of a universal feeling. especially in these dark times. But I’m rambling now.
The other thing I love in D&D is trying to come up with new ways to do things. So I can tell you this adventure has a labyrinth in it – a notoriously difficult thing to run and keep interesting. We’ve all been in games where the maze went something like, “You walk ahead 10 feet and come to an intersection where you can go left or right.” the party, as one: “Always go right!” “You go right. You walk ahead 10 feet and come to an intersection where you can go left or right.” Etc.
So this adventure has something different. I gave DMs the option of running it the usual way, or running it cinematically. The form it takes is kind of a mini-point crawl in the middle of the story. Does it work? I think so. I’ve done similar things in my games, and thought they turned out well. Hopefully someone will let me know how it goes for them. Hopefully, they’ll enjoy it.
Anyway, here is the adventure link, and I’ll post the cover on this entry, up at the top, where they always are.
And we’ll se you back here soon. Same bat time. Same bat channel.
Deep in the wilds, the Temple of the Shrike lies in ruin, overgrown and haunted by vengeance. Once a druidic sanctuary, it became a grave when settlers slaughtered its guardians, impaling their bodies and burning their children alive.
A single child, horribly disfigured, survived. Now, she has returned, her wrath woven into a labyrinth of thorns and the unfinished Wicker Behemoth. The land does not weep. It does not mourn.
It simply waits.
Before you go any further, read this!!! This story contains themes of vengeance, destruction, and generational guilt. Readers may also encounter unsettling depictions of massacres, human sacrifice, impalement, and the haunting weight of past atrocities. Please proceed with caution if you are sensitive to these themes. For some of you, this is exactly why you have purchased this adventure. For others…
I’ve taken a few days off work. I didn’t take much time off last year, and I’ve been slow to burn through it so far this year. With all the changes going on, there have just been too many things to catch up on, stay on top of, get going on. Anyone who knows me knows I don’t really do the whole work/life balance thing – I love my job, and want to be there. When I’m at home, I work on other things. There just never seems to be enough time for all the things I want to do, and I’m sure I’m not alone.
I find myself rushing between projects, juggling responsibilities, and moving things around. prioritizing. As a result, I usually end up being late for everything. I showed up 20 minutes late for a D&D game recently, apologizing for being late (as usual), and it was agreed around the table that if I ever showed up on time, everyone would know something is wrong. I mean, that’s probably true.
So, what am I doing with these few days off work? I tacked them onto the end of a long weekend, giving me some extra time. I have spent a bunch of that with my daughter and her German Shepard. But I really took this time off to catch up on the work I do at home. Writing fiction, submitting stories, and (as of 2025) designing and creating Dungeons and Dragons adventures. I’ve subbed a story to an anthology that looks promising, and I’ve mapped out a story I would like to write for another. Still waiting to hear back on a couple I currently have out.
I’ve also completed the second part of a trilogy of adventures I mentioned on here before. I’m itching to get them out in the world and off my plate, but I’m committed to releasing them all at once. And I’ve mapped out another adventure I pulled out of me D23 notebook from a couple years ago – I never finished because I ended up spending much of the spring, summer, and fall of 2023 assisting with more than 20,000 evacuees who came through our little town when the NWT and our surrounding communities were evacuated. There just wasn’t enough time.
I feel many artists might agree with this: The older you get, the more you wonder if there will be enough time to do all the things you want to do. The more you wonder if you will be able to look back and think, did I do enough? Have I contributed positively to the things I believed in? Did I spend enough time with the ones I most loved?
Of course not. There will never be enough time for all of that. Just ask Pink Floyd:
And you run, and you run, to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking. And racing around, to come up behind you again. The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older. Shorter of breath. And one day closer to death.
The other day I mentioned that I had a castoff map written up that I was putting together as its own adventure – a plot line that had started tangling up the trilogy I’m working on. I took a break from the trilogy to put this together, and as of a couple days ago, it’s now live on the DMs Guild.
Here’s the teaser from the front of the book:
They were heroes lost to time. But they bore a dark secret…
Beneath the earth, where history is buried and forgotten, something stirs. The Crypt of the Four, once a monument to legendary heroes, has been defiled, twisted by a presence long erased. The Fifth has returned.
Shadows stretch unnaturally, whispers claw at the edges of thought, and the past refuses to stay dead. A name, chiseled from stone, lingers. Waiting to be spoken. Mockeries of the past writhe in stitched flesh, torches flicker with spectral flame, and sorrow thickens the air.
Uncover the truth. Face what was lost.
But beware… some names were meant to be forgotten.
So this is a mystery dungeon adventure, where the players can go through and explore rooms and collect clues to give them a better understanding of the story. My favourite kind of dungeon, really.
This is a longer adventure than the previous two, as the dungeon is much bigger. I’ve priced it the same as the others, however, because I’ve been a writer long enough to know that there is no money in writing. Just to be sure, I’m making these as affordable as possible.
I’m really have a lot of fun putting these together. And I’m thrilled that the prospect people are buying these stories to run at their own tables. Kinda makes me feel like I’m DMing a huge game all over the place.
I have been looking into nontraditional ways to make these into print copies, for conventions and stuff. My local museum stocks a bunch of my books because the Town of High Level staff are awesome and folks around here do one thing better than anyone else: lift each other up.
I’m including a copy of the cover of The Crypt of the Four, which you can find on the DMs Guild:
J.W. Schnarr 