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Rethinking Initiative

January 28, 2015 by newbiedm

“You enter a room, the smell in here’s musky. The ground is covered in a fine dust, and you can see footprints, along with a few drops of fresh blood.” “The creatures must have come through here. I want to roll perception, maybe to see if I hear something… 15… Anything?” “You do, you hear soft […]

Converting the 2e Realms to 5e

September 29, 2014 by newbiedm

In a previous post I wrote about setting my home game in the Forgotten Realms around the time period of the 2nd edition version of D&D, which would put us in Faerun in 1368DR. For those of you keeping track at home, the original boxed set of the Forgotten Reams placed the timeline at 1357DR, […]

Campaign building with the Monster Manual

September 10, 2014 by newbiedm

“This bestiary is for storytellers and world-builders.” – Monster Manual introduction The D&D 5th Ed. Monster Manual releases on September 19th for those stores that take part in the WOTC WPN program, and on September 30th for everyone else. A few Monster Manuals saw the light of day at Gencon, and we’ve seen some bits […]

87 DM tips.

July 31, 2013 by newbiedm

I went crazy on twitter last night. I was doing some fiction writing (non rpg) when I suddenly stopped and thought about how I really haven’t been doing my job as “newbiedm”, which basically is to try and help new dm’s do their job right. So I started tweeting tips. And before I knew it, […]

Discussion: Does the game influence DMing styles?

November 15, 2011 by newbiedm

Monte Cook’s Legends are Lore articles are a little puzzling to me. They certainly take an old school approach to D&D that isn’t even present in Monte’s own version of D&D (3.0), but that’s a thought for another time… The latest article asks if “the game presents players with challenges that have pre-made solutions?” This is something […]

Review: Lair Assault – Forge of the Dawn Titan

September 27, 2011 by TheSheDM

Here there be Spoilers: Players wanting to be surprised when they play Lair Assault should steer away now! The other weekend, I sat down to judge my first session of Lair Assault – Forge of the Dawn Titan. In a sort of “slot zero” session, I had arranged for many of the DMs at my […]

Return of the Minicast

September 20, 2011 by newbiedm

So once upon a time I had a podcast called the NewbieDM.com Minicast, and it was nominated for an ENnie and stuff…. and then… poof… it disappeared due to several factors. Well, I want to bring it back. So I’m ready to start production on Season 2 of the show… It’ll be the same format, […]

Planning Neverwinter

September 9, 2011 by newbiedm

One of the strengths of the Neverwinter campaign setting, as I stated in my review, is the inclusion of character themes. Character themes were first introduced in the Dark Sun setting as a way to tie the PC’s into the world, with a ready to go plot hook for the DM to build stories around. […]

The Ipad DM: Goodreader

September 1, 2011 by newbiedm

In my previous post on this series, I wrote about Index Cards, a screenwriting app suitable for organizing details of your campaign. Now, I’m going to show you Goodreader, the app I use for reading, organizing, marking, and making printouts of pdf’s in my gaming library. At $4.99, it’s cheap and very useful, and I […]

3 Years Behind the Screen

July 20, 2011 by newbiedm

Last month marked my third anniversary as a full time DM, and I still enjoy it so much that I haven’t passed the baton to someone else. It’s actually pretty incredible that I’ve been able to do it for so long without losing much interest (and the same goes for running this blog), as I […]