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DM Tips

What Gilligan’s Island Teaches us About Dungeons and Dragons

A movie star, a professor, a millionaire (and his wife) and a lovable fool band together over a shared goal and go on wacky adventures. Aside from providing the perfect setup to waste a morning binge-watching classic TV, this arrangement of characters also describes every Dungeons and Dragons party ever created. And it reveals a truth about a tricky subject for DND: party formation.

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Planar Adventures

The Demon’s Axe: A D&D Adventure Starring Planescape’s Molydeus

The Molydeus is the only Guardian Demon and serves a distinct and almost un-demon-like purpose: policing the will of the demon princes.

The box set “Hellbound: The Blood War,” describes a pit fiend that has stolen a Molydeus’s weapon and keeps the creature alive in captivity in order to wield it. The materials stopped at that brief description, never creating an arc for a full adventure.

Let’s do that today.

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The Outer Planes

Acheron Re-Imagined: The Endless Tournament

The official Planescape and DND 5e materials describe Acheron as a plane where iron cubes constantly collide with each other.
On the gameplay level, this supports scavenging through battlefields or being thrust into pointless struggles, perhaps as slaves, mercenaries, or unwilling participants. But is this realizing Acheron’s potential as a plane embodying law and conflict?

Let’s see how we can spice it up.

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Introduction to Planescape

Introduction to Planescape 4/4: Adding Planescape to Your Campaign

In this Introduction to Planescape Series, we first explained why Planescape exists as both Dungeons and Dragons’ Theory of the Planes and as a specific setting, then explored each of the two aspects in more detail. In this final article of the series, we will put everything together and discuss how GMs should and should not introduce Planescape into their campaigns.

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Introduction to Planescape

Introduction to Planescape 3/4: Understanding the Core Setting

The Planescape campaign setting published for DND Second Edition is filled with complex NPCs, fantastic locations, villainous schemes, and the peerless artwork of Tony DiTerlizzi. But how do you find what you’re looking for in an out-of-print setting with 4 box sets and 20+ published adventures? This article will get you started, laying out the basics you need to know and other resources that will help you run the setting.

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Introduction to Planescape

Introduction to Planescape 2/4: D&D’s Unified Theory of the Planes

The planes are critical for helping players rationalize and organize information about some of the aspects of Dungeons & Dragons that are both the most fun and most confusing. The 5e writers identify these problems, listing them as the justification behind the minimum number of planes required for most DND campaigns (DMG, p.43): Where do Fiends and Celestials come from? Where do the deities “reside”? Where do mortal souls go after one dies?

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