Tag: 5e

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A hero in the making

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 😉

You can find my published adventures here.

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Our most precious resource

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.

If you’re not there yet, you soon will be.

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The Crypt of the Four is now live!

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:

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/511792/The-Crypt-of-the-Four?src=newest_in_dmg&filters=45469

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Win some, lose some

So this week was a good news, bad news kinda week. I’ve sold a story to an anthology I was really excited about and am now just waiting for permission to formally announce it. I was really happy with the story when I finished it, and am glad I was able to land a spot where I had intended it to go.

On the bad news front, a story I felt was a potential contender for another anthology didn’t make it through the second round of cuts. I wrote something I hoped would be far enough outside what they were likely seeing lots of, but perhaps it was a little too far out. It’s always letdown when you experience the initial “We love it!” and then a followup of “…just not IN love with it.” This is the reality of things though, and we move on. I’m pretty confident I’ll find a home for it eventually, as the theme was pretty broad.

On the TTRPG side of things, I am just about ready to publish another adventure. This one, called “The Crypt of the Four”, was the result of me overthinking something else I was working on, stripping out an entire subplot, and make it an adventure on its own. I’ll leave the details for when I post it to the Dungeon Master’s Guild (it’ll be soon!).

I’m also coming to the end of the second adventure in the trilogy I was working on, and think I have a doozy of an adventure planned for the third and final story. It’s really going to put a cap on things, and I hope folks will give it a shot.

One thing I love doing is selling books personally at conventions, and I’ve been trying to think of ways to make these adventures into physical projects that could be sold. I’m currently exploring a number of different formats for this. I know the easy one would be to bind a bunch of them up in a book, but I’m also looking at smaller ways of doing this. I’ll keep you posted.

The art I’ve included is from my forthcoming adventure, “The Crypt of the Four”. Hope you like it!

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A new project or three

First, a couple updates on the fiction front.
I recently heard back from an editor I respect and admire greatly that a story I had submitted has made it to the final round of consideration for an upcoming anthology. Great news! The last anthology this editing team put together landed them an Aurora award – I was lucky enough to have made it into that one as well.

I have another story that has made it past the first round of cuts for another anthology, and am waiting patiently to hear back from several others. I’ll keep you posted.

Following the successful launch of my first two short D&D adventures on the DMs Guild, I sat back and watched the money roll in.

Ok, that’s a lie, because a) I immediately got sucked into a much larger project, and b) everyone knows there is no money in writing these days.

I finished another adventure, but the story just didn’t seem to be over. So in the grand old tradition of Dungeons and Dragons, I just… kept going. The adventure is now going to be a trilogy, and my plan is to release them all together because waiting for things is annoying.

I am very lucky to know one of the smartest D&D minds out there, one of my best pals, who is able to very clearly tell me when my ideas are getting off the rails. Usually, it’s things like “Resist overcomplicating this at all costs.” Every creative person out there knows the value of having people around you can bounce ideas off who won’t immediately go to “You should do this!” And I happen to have a few of them.

So about this new trilogy? My working title for it has been “The Glimmering Plague” and involves a group of dwarves uncovering an ancient elven artifact that’s been corrupted. after wreaking havoc on the nearby village, the story gets bigger from there, putting the players, the elves, and the dwarves all in conflict, while dealing with a growing horror that threatens the entire region. Since I need to have a photo to go with this post, I’ll give you a little teaser of something that happens in the first act of the trilogy. Hope you enjoy it!

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My first foray into adventures

As a palate cleanser between stories this year, I have been working on something I have been doing for fun for damn near 40 years, but have never put out in the world. Dungeons and Dragons adventure modules. The first two are live now on Dungeon Masters Guild, and I have a longer one I am just wrapping up.

These first two adventures were one-offs I wrote into a two-year Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign that we just wrapped up before Christmas. I probably added a dozen or so adventures to that game and an entire subplot involving time travel and Vecna, and I would like to get some of them down before they are lost forever. I probably have 1,000 or more commercially-licensed maps, and no end to ideas when it comes to one or two-night adventures.

The first of the adventures I’ve called The Changelings.

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

I have put it up on Dungeon Master’s Guild for $2.99 US (sorry, Canadians – gotta get that money before the tariffs come in!)

If you are interested in this sort of thing, and pick it up, I would love to hear how it goes.

For more information, please check it out over here:

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/510011/The-Changelings?filters=45469