Tag: dungeons-and-dragons

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The Hexen Temple

The Hexen Temple, the second adventure in the Amberblight Quintet, is now live on Amazon – for those of you who prefer paper over pixels (like myself). If you are just getting caught up, here is where we sit at the beginning of The Hexen Temple:

An ancient Elven artifact has been discovered beneath the long deserted Dwarven outpost known as Rockshield. The artifact, once buried at the base of a great magical tree, unleashed a horrific blight upon the region when activated, and it was only the actions of a brave adventuring company that stopped the blight from spreading across the realm.

Now, the artifact is seemingly deactivated, but it has a strange habit of drawing in anyone near it with whispered promises of power, wealth, and potential.

The Elves are coming to reclaim the artifact for themselves, while the local dwarves have other ideas. On the eve of the arrival of two elven envoys, a group of Rockshield dwarves steal the artifact, determined not to let it fall into elven hands.

Enspelled by its power, they attack and kidnap the residents of a hunting village before retreating into a Dwarven crypt nearby, determined to reactivate the artifact and gain the wealth, and power the artifact has promised.

The elves are determined not to let this happen. They alone know what the artifact is, and what it is capable of, but they are not telling anyone.

All that is known is the artifact is important enough for the elves to be willing to die in service of retrieving it. And they are also willing to kill…

So that is the story. But you may be asking yourself, what do you actually do?

In The Hexen Temple, your players will be part of the discussions between the envoys and get a chance to decide for themselves which of the two competing groups of elves they join to reclaim the object. They will race into the mountains, trying to beat the competing elves to the site of the Hexen Temple, and then face off against dwarves, Skarnid mutations, and the competing elves who are now determined to claim the artifact at any cost. The adventure culminates in a battle between the horrific secret at the heart of the Hexen Temple, the dwarves, the Skarnid mutations, the competing elves, and the players themselves.

And you know, since this is book 2 of 5, you know it’s only going to get more dangerous from here on out…

Check out The Hexen Temple in print on Amazon.ca:
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0FH3Y57JC

or on Amazon.com:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FH3Y57JC

And for those of you who prefer pixels, it’s been available on the Dungeon Master’s Guild site for a few months now:
https://www.dmsguild.com/product/519379/The-Hexen-Temple–Book-II-of-the-Amberblight-Quintet

Hope you enjoy it! And watch out for “The Hymn of the Hollow God” – Book III of the Amberblight Quintet – coming out on digital at the Dungeon Master’s Guild later this month!

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Two more adventures headed to Amazon

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.

If you are interested in picking up The Den in print, you can check it out here:
The Den on Amazon.com
The Den on Amazon.ca

Also, here is the video trailer I made for it:


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Temple of the Shrike

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…

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Temple of the Shrike at DMs Guild

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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!