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“The 36 Dramatic Situations” by Georges Polti

April 8, 2010 by newbiedm

“The 36 Dramatic Situations” is a 19th century book by french author Georges Polti. By analyzing Greek texts and contemporary French writings, Polti attempted to categorize every dramatic situation that might occur in a story. This list of 36 situations remains, until today, very popular among writers and storytellers. Here now are the situations: 1. […]

D&D Encounters Twitter Effects

March 25, 2010 by newbiedm

D&D Encounters is an organized play thing Wizards is doing on Wednesday nights at game stores around the country. On Twitter, they post certain effects that DM’s can grab and use at their table during the session. While I am not playing in D&D Encounters, I thought it would be kind of neat to collect […]

NewbieDM Review: Harrowing Halls 3d Dungeon Tiles

March 11, 2010 by newbiedm

The Harrowing Halls set in the Dungeon Tiles line fill a different niche from that of previous sets. The included 3d tiles aside, the 2d stuff is unlike any seen in previous Dungeon Tiles sets. If you’ve ever wanted to design the inside of an inn, or perhaps a mansion, then this is the set […]

Hating the sound of my voice…

March 1, 2010 by newbiedm

Just a quick post to plug two things… I had the chance to join in on a discussion of the “Underdark” book over at “The Tome Show” podcast with the show’s host, Jeff Greiner and two additional guests, Mark from Dice Monkey and Chris from Icosahedrophilia. Go check it out if you want to hear […]

New DM’s: Have fun reskinning and playing with keywords

February 26, 2010 by newbiedm

One aspect of D&D 4th Ed. that I like a lot is its simplicity in letting you make the game as customized as you want, both rules wise and story/role-playing wise. The other day on twitter I went as far as calling it “possibly the most abstract D&D yet”, and some people didn’t really […]

Condition cards errata

February 25, 2010 by newbiedm

I was alerted that the PRONE and DOMINATED conditions received a beating with the errata stick, so my original cards are wrong. Here are the corrected cards.

Couple of neat finds…

February 22, 2010 by newbiedm

Here are a couple of neat things I found that you can use in your D&D game. Enjoy! First, here’s a thieves cant dictionary. Now your Guildmaster at the Thieve’s Guild doesn’t have to sound like he came out of 2010. Let’s Kimbaw the Cull. Second, here’s a bunch of art from old books. […]

A brief video on 3d Dungeon Tiles

February 17, 2010 by newbiedm

This is a brief example on 3d Dungeon Tiles. I’ve written about this before, but now you can see them on these fancy moving pictures on my youtube channel thingy on the intertubes. I apologize in advance for the muffled sound, I have to get a better mic if I plan to keep making these […]

Improved Initiative: Running combats with the Combat Manager v1.6.0

December 15, 2009 by newbiedm

This is the second part of the D&D 4e Combat Manager v1.6.0 overview. In my last post I introduced the program and highlighted how simple it was to build your permanent PC/Creatures library to use in your encounters. Now, I’ll quickly go through an actual encounter so you can see how useful this program can […]

NewbieDM Tutorial: The Battlemap Part III

November 17, 2009 by newbiedm

Here is the last part of the battlemap tutorials for NewbieDM.com, written by professional cartographer Jonathan Roberts. Click here for part 1, and here for part 2. At the end of the last tutorial we had a lovely map, though it’s a little bare. In this tutorial I’ll cover the little tweaks that will finish […]