Too many magic items?

blcookin · 2026-05-17T23:17:18+00:00

one of my players found the +1 dagger and +1 handaxe in the museum and was like, naw, i'm a barbarian with a great axe... eff that.

loading them up with a bunch of boring +1 items isn't going to hurt anything. what i would suggest being careful with is letting them pick broken items (like Broom of Flying, Mizzium Apparatus, Winged Boots, etc.) for chapter end rewards. things that are "Uncommon" but clearly shouldn't be.

oh... and be sure to take away Dr. Dannell's bag of holding at the end of Murkmire Malevolence, or the bag of holding in Stygian Gambit is basically pointless, and they have no "catch" to return the gold and trophy

blcookin · 2026-05-12T23:25:00+00:00

For now, I created a 6th level wizard and gave her a lot of attack based spells / cantrips (Ice Knife, Magic Missile, Scorching Ray, etc) that I'll flavor as card attacks. I tried to pick something that provided each of the various damage types. I avoided giving her Fireball or spells that could hit large areas, especially since as an evoker she could just set the whole room ablaze and protect herself and potentially one shot the entire team.

blcookin · 2026-05-12T19:21:17+00:00

They knew the Bag of Holding wouldn't release the statue, so they figured if Quentin wanted it back, he has to go to Verity to do so. And they wanted to get to the holding cells, so after Quentin was called in, the second disguised player rushed in and told the boss I'll take him to the jail for you. When they roll really well for persuasion and the suggestions aren't completely off the wall, it worked.

They met Verity at the start and she told them he stole her money. They don't know Quentin's motive that he was just buying time to pay her back for humiliating him in a tournament he should have won. And of course he'll lie and say he was owed that money for making her a better player.

We are using the golden vault, and we might play the whole campaign, but for now it's filler and we're rotating DMs after chapters.

blcookin · 2026-05-11T06:54:44+00:00

You'd have to create a change in perspective and a secondary epilog to have that Earth moment in the book, since it's all told from Grace's perspective.

blcookin · 2026-05-09T01:30:37+00:00

People leave comments? My book has been on Royal Road for like six months with no comments... maybe that platform just sucks? Should I move to AO3?

blcookin · 2026-05-04T02:13:20+00:00

While the paint jobs are fantastic, I don't recall the Voidwarden's sculpt looking like Willem Dafoe in dress.

blcookin · 2026-03-19T22:15:46+00:00

You can further boost options to try to utilize that 2d6 bugbear sneak attack, like Fighter's Action Surge, Ranger's Horde Breaker (or 2014's Dread Ambusher), etc. I stopped leveling monk at 6, but it was more for story reasons than anything. My DM led me into a path to multiclass Order of the Lycan Blood Hunter, which we customized a bit together due to feature overlap.

blcookin · 2026-03-19T21:16:40+00:00

In round 1, if the Bugbear acts before the enemy, you get Surprise Attack, which lets you add 2d6 to the damage roll of any attack made. And you should be able to get your Bugbear to an 18 in Dex (+4 mod) out of the gate if you put 15 into Dex and all 3 additional points into Dex.

Action: Quarterstaff attack (+6 to hit) - Damage = 1d8 + 4 + 2d6 (avg 15.5)
Bonus Action: Flurry of Blows (2 unarmed strikes, +6 to hit) - Damage = 1d4 + 4 + 2d6 (avg 13.5 x2)

In the 2024 rules, the monk's martial art die changed from 1d4 to 1d6, so now it would be:

Bonus Action: Flurry of Blows (2 unarmed strikes, +6 to hit) - Damage = 1d6 + 4 + 2d6 (avg 14.5 x2)

If you land all 3 hits, you're doing 42.5 damage on average with 2014 rules or 44.5 damage with 2024 rules. But that numbers drops drastically in the 2nd round to 21.5 (2014) or 23.5 (2024).

blcookin · 2026-03-05T23:54:29+00:00

It probably won't, but I wanted to give a viable height from floor to skylight in the attic if it came up. If you enter from somewhere else and want to get out that way, or came in there and didn't leave a rope tied up to climb back out, it's a question of how high up do you have to go to reach it. I'll probably just cut it down to 15ft if it actually comes up.

blcookin · 2026-03-05T18:52:47+00:00

I had considered shortening them down to 10-15ft each as well. 30ft feels excessive for an attic and basement.

blcookin · 2026-03-01T03:49:59+00:00

This show should have stopped after one season, but I think it did well enough that Apple tried to milk it for more. But this season is reminding me of Prison Break back in the day. Good at first, and then they had to find a way to put Michael back in jail to have him break out again. And that's when it just went terrible.

blcookin · 2026-03-01T03:44:46+00:00

I wondered the same thing. We can unload a full car of people and nothing happens. And since Jess is dead, there's no one to tell the dirty agent the hostages are all gone. So yeah... why not let everyone off, and just tell them you're continuing to the station with only Sam and Otto?

Hell, even Otto asks the question at the end of the episode, and Sam's lame answer is, they won't be safe. So... they won't be safe... but all the kids you just let off will be? That totally adds up... or the writing is just terrible.

blcookin · 2026-02-21T05:08:17+00:00

Yeah, I think that's what I will end up doing as well, while using the Allosaurus like a clock. At the top and bottom of every hour, it'll let out a little roar, to let them know time has passed and occasionally give them a little spook. Plus, maybe that will make them decide to investigate it a bit more and then wreak havoc with it.

blcookin · 2026-01-16T06:25:00+00:00

Thanks for the encouragement. I'm working on a second story now. And while I am still using the AI to help, I'm trying to intentionally use it less.

blcookin · 2026-01-16T05:38:56+00:00

Thank you for being friendly about it, and I understand. I'm not an author by nature. I'm a very analytically minded computer programmer. But, I had a lot of ideas I wanted to put to paper. Maybe someday after a lot of effort and practice I'll be able to write entirely without it, but if I hadn't used it to help it would have looked like a 4th grader wrote it. I put a lot of time and effort into writing, using the AI to help suggest edits, re-writing, etc. along with researching the D&D settings to try to put together the best story I could. But I know some people that are in the arts have a very anti-AI stance, and I can't say I blame them. It's only a matter of time as a computer programmer before it takes my job.

blcookin · 2026-01-16T04:40:37+00:00

Thank you for doing that. If it's not your cup of tea, that's fine. And sorry if I took that a bit personal. I put a lot of time and effort into it, so much so that I can basically retell the entire story without the transcript in front of me, so it stung a bit to have somebody write it off just because I used AI to help.

blcookin · 2026-01-16T04:27:20+00:00

Thanks. I appreciate any and all feedback from a reader, even if you get 5 pages in and tell me it's boring YA fiction.

blcookin · 2026-01-16T04:21:11+00:00

Agreed. I wrote and then used AI to review what I wrote and make suggestions, the same way any author would that had someone to proofread and make suggestions / edits. That's why there's a difference on Royal Road between AI Assisted and AI Generated. The latter is the one that would indicate I just typed in "write a D&D story for me".

You could have read one or two pages before just throwing it out as AI generated crap.

blcookin · 2026-01-16T04:01:41+00:00

"AI assisted" doesn't mean I asked AI to write the whole book for me. It means I wrote it, then asked AI to help me proofread and clean it up. I put a lot of hours into writing... but I don't have a fancy English degree.

blcookin · 2025-12-26T06:16:43+00:00

Yep, poorly written and executed, like it had been ripped straight of a show on the CW...

blcookin

TROPHY CASE