William Brandes Stoddard posts
Posts: 167
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Updated Bastion Special Facilities, Part Two
I am so grateful for the positive responses to the last two posts in this series that I’m continuing without delay, before the deadline doom of the next few months eats my head again. Let’s see how many of these I can get through.Improving Bastions|Updated Special Facilities pt 1 | Updated Special Facilities pt 2Wo...
Updated Bastion Special Facilities, Part One
I had fun revising the first few Bastion Special Facilities in my previous post, so today I’m doing a few more. I’m still not sure what I want to do with the Barrack, beyond adding an -s to the end as most English speakers would, so I’m starting with the Garden.Improving Bastions | Updated Special Facilities pt 1...
Improving Bastions in D&D 2024
I’ve talked before about what a mess I think the 2024 DMG’s Bastion rules are. With all respect to the designers, I think there are good LEGOs in the pile, but this arrangement of them doesn’t serve the needs of the game or the story.The IssuesFirst, I’ll recapitulate the things I see as the issues, even if I d...
A Fifteenth Year of Blogging
It’s another year of blogging done, even if the last few months have been very thin around here. Some of my big clients have had steady work for me, and Citadel has taken whatever was left over from that. We’ll see how that develops over the next year.Games I’m Running1. Aurikesh has just hit 13 years and 169 ses...
Coven of the Written Word
For Halloween, Kainenchen put together an awesome good-witch costume. Not in, you know, the Oz sense, though she’s also just finished rereading The Wizard of Oz and picked up the next book. Anyway, this subclass hasn’t seen any review from the Worlds Beyond Number team, but it was commissioned by a higher authority...
LARP Design: Castle Puzzle Box
This past weekend (19-21 September 2025), we ran the third three-day event for Citadel LARP, at Booker T State Park in Tennessee. Serella Savenko and I created another puzzle box, our most elaborate design so far by a very wide margin. We were initially building it to go into play at the July event, but that absolutely...
Twenty Hirelings Awaiting Certain Doom
The use of hirelings isn’t nearly as common in D&D as it once was, but I think we should bring that back a bit. In addition to shoring up a party’s weakness and draining some cash out of their coffers, hirelings also provide someone who can die horribly to showcase a monster’s sick dance moves. Oh, and they make ...
The Merciless Snare of Sorcery
What follows is a microgame that I wrote for Dancing Stickman's LAARG project on Bluesky (which is why the text refers to posting your playthrough on Bluesky). I don't work in the microgame space, um, ever, but I enjoyed writing this, and I hope you'll enjoy it too.In which magic is lost and might be regain...
LARP Design: Second Puzzle Box
We ran a one-day event for Citadel LARP this past weekend (19 July), and we put our second puzzle box design into play this time. Serella Savenko helped me with every step of planning and building this one. I want to thank Elena Simon for providing the box itself, and Laurie Zolkosky for driving back to Atlanta to get ...
UA 2025: The Psion Breakdown
Not even the Ranger has had as many UA releases thrown at it as the Psion (née Mystic). Searching through the dusty, moldering archives of this very website, I see that I last wrote a UA breakdown about psionics in 2020, but it was already in good company. I was genuinely surprised to see a new attempt, because I hone...
UA 2025: Horror Subclasses Breakdown
I haven’t written an UA breakdown in a hot minute—the last one was before the three core books of 2024-25 dropped!—but this drop sucked me back in. Part of this is to find out where the reading audience is these days. I’m sad to see that they’ve dropped bylines for UA articles; I liked knowing whose ideas I w...
Citadel LARP Design: Puzzle Box
So I’m a huge fan of games like The Room and Boxes, and I really wanted to bring some of that experience to Citadel LARP. Let’s set aside for a second the fact that the boxes in those games aren’t constrained by the cruel realities of Euclidean space the way my work must be. It doesn’t help that I don’t know ...
Avenging Heart is available in Horizons!
Hey friends! I am excited to share with you today this sample of "Avenging Heart," an adventure I wrote for Wildmage Press's Horizons magazine. It's just a taste of the awesome stuff found in Issue 3, so get on over to Wildmage Press and read the whole thing.
Dungeon Design Lessons from Blue Prince
If you’re like Kainenchen and me, you’ve been utterly obsessed with Blue Prince for the last month or more. Now, a roguelike puzzle game isn’t necessarily for everyone, but the lessons the game has to offer are for everyone with even a passing interest in dungeon design. This list is not exhaustive. You can help ...
Dominoes and Dice Resolution Mechanic
Okay, I’ve gone away and had a long think about a core resolution mechanic for a Dust to Dust-based tabletop game. For aesthetic reasons, a core resolution mechanic for this game should involve dominoes, but what if it’s a combination dice-and-dominoes system? (The fact that both “dice-and-dominoes” and “Dust...
Ruby Talon Deeps: Locations 4
It doesn’t seem possible that it has been almost two years since the last time I posted something about Ruby Talon Deeps, or that I first drew it almost three and a half years ago. Time is weird and I don’t think I like it. For some reason this feels possible to write only now, when earlier today I finished the fir...
Twenty Magic Item Flaws
One of my professional projects and working on Citadel LARP have converged on exploring magic item flaws of varying severity. The space between a flaw and a curse is largely semantic, but if you’re compelled to keep using the item that doesn’t work quiteas advertised, that’s definitely a curse. In this post, I’...
Grathe-Dzerin, the Sanctuary in the Abyss
The location described below is an idea that I’ve been pondering for awhile now: a relatively safe settlement in the Abyss that PCs can use as a base of operations for adventures in tiers 3 and 4. One of the things about the Abyss is that it can be soawful and corrupting that it’s hard to have a fun adventure. (D&D...
Twenty Strange but Useful People to Meet in the Dungeon
If you need some weirdos for your PCs to meet while exploring the dungeon, if you need a change of pace between two fights or just think a minor social encounter sounds like the thing, this table is for you! (The three other tables linked below could also serve, depending on your situation. Never overlook the potential...
Improving Backgrounds in D&D 2024, Part Two
I liked the direction things were going in my last post, so today I’m continuing that with as many more Backgrounds as I can get through. Last time I covered Acolytes, Charlatans, and Criminals, so today I’m starting with Criminal (Spy).I always thought it was cool to have a few Backgrounds that were closely enough...
Improving Backgrounds in D&D 2024
I’ve got a number of issues with the way the 2024 rules change Backgrounds from their 2014 form. In this post I want to dig into those issues and see if we can improve upon them. If I stumble upon something worth having, this could become a DM’s Guild release, much like my Level Up Your Backgroundposts did.Some of ...
LARP Design: Traversal Challenges
We’re in the run-up to the first full weekend event of Citadel LARP. The Citadel in the name is a dungeon for as much of that old-school dungeon-crawling feel as we can manage in a LARP, and one of the ways we do that is to lean into something that has been part of LARPing from the early days. A traversal challengeis...
A Fourteenth Year of Blogging
The actual anniversary of my blog was a few days ago, and I was just so buried in other tasks that I’m only now getting around to writing this. Every year I like to talk about what I’m playing, what I’m running, and otherwise what I’m enjoying.Games I’m Running1. Aurikesh is still going strong after 12 years ...
Titles and Honors to Award Your PCs
I’ve been a huge fan of Robin Pierson’s History of Byzantiumpodcast since… whenever I finished listening to Mike Duncan’s The History of Rome(I also talked about Byzantine history here), and the part where Robin explains court titles and the importance of honors to the power dynamics of Eastern Rome fascinated ...
LARP Design: Character Creation Goal-Setting
If you’re the kind of person who reads my LARP design posts, you probably already know about Citadel LARP(but I’ll link it just in case). This post isn’t solely about Citadel, though, as I’ve also started playing two other games recently, Alliance Atlantaand Resurgence LARP, and those games also factor into thi...
Five New Fey Magic Items
It’s been an incredibly busy month, and next month won’t be easing up, so I’m sneaking in under the wire to get a second post up in September. On the plus side, I think it’s all work that is making me a better writer. Because it matters in one or two places, these are written to 5e.24.Diadem of the Silver Knigh...
Ten NPC Adventuring Parties
I’ve done a few posts now that are collections of NPCs you can drop into your campaign. I usually do sets of twenty at a time, but since these are going to have more description for each item, and both Patreon and Wordpress do awful violence to tables, I’m doing ten adventuring parties at a time and we’ll see how...
Alternative Keen Mind and Observant Feats
Over in Tribality, I’ve posted some initial thoughtson the 2024 Player’s Handbook revised rules. If you haven’t already seen that article, here’s the short version: I like a lot of things, but dislike a substantial number of changes too. Today I’m talking in more detail about the Keen Mind and Observant feats...
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NPC Stat Block: Zealot
In my Aurikesh campaign, my PCs are in rebellion against the prince of the domain they live in. I've given them the names and brief descriptions of a bunch of the Prince's inner circle of advisors and military commanders. As much as possible, I wanted these characters to feellike the opposite numbers of PCs and...
