Bad week. Not gonna talk about it here and now.

More important topic. Gnomes. What the fuck?

D&D gnomes, specifically. Why are they necessary? What role do they serve? What is supposed to be their unique schtick? 'cause as far as I can tell, they're basically comic relief for people who don't think halflings go far enough out on the "wacky jolly small people" axis.

Now, I have seen halflings played straight, and played downright unnerving (looking at you, Kulik). But that's rare in my experience. Gnomes... seem to have taken too many cues from their counterparts in World of Warcraft, what with the slapstick pranks and anime hair and woo-woo anachronistic tinkering. (Not being an old-school D&D player, I am uncertain if they were like that before WoW came on the scene.)

So, D&D5 character concept in search of a campaign.

I really want to take a tabaxi from Volo's Guide to Monsters and give him a cosmetic rework as a snow leopard.

And then take the kensai monk subclass from this week's Unearthed Arcana posting.

And play this character:



Because how fucking badass is a snow leopard samurai?

(Actually, I'd go Tibetan rather than Japanese for cultural inspiration, because snow leopard. But that's some great artwork.)

The next low bar for converting Iron Kingdoms to D&D5 is ( races. )

Doing a bit of tinkering for a lightweight port of Iron Kingdoms into D&D5e. First up, ( the gun mage. )

I am a somewhat anomalous gamer. I did not grow up playing D&D. As a matter of fact, before 3.0 released, I'd played a total of two sessions of AD&D - both times sitting in on someone's long-running game and dying about two-thirds of the way through the evening.

When 3.0 came out, I decided I wanted to try running it. This was at the dawn of the OGL bubble, and my only available resources were the PHB, the DMG, and White Wolf's Creature Collection. I took those three things and some elements of the fiction I'd read over the preceding decade and slammed it all together to create a setting. The result was the Ashen Lands, which may have been my longest-running GMing experience.

After that campaign fell apart due to GM burnout and group dissolution, the scattered notes sat on a succession of hard drives. I didn't do much with them until a couple of years ago, when I was working on a New Year's Eve one-shot for some close friends. I was running Fantasy Craft and needed a setting to use with the FC engine, so I dusted off my notes and updated them to align with my current tastes and the FC races and alignment systems.

A forum thread I was just reading reminded me of that work, and I figured one of my three loyal readers might be briefly amused. The resulting setting "sourcebook" is available here, with an attendant Google Map of the known world here. Enjoy.