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Adventure Hooks DM Resources

Adventure Hooks: Gambling

a-to-z-2014-gGambling can be thrilling. The idea that you can place a bet on something, and if successful win a sizable reward appeals to most people. Gambling can serve as an invigorating adrenaline rush for those who play for high stakes. It can be a form of entertainment for those who can afford to lose. It can give hope to the desperate and inspiration to the lazy. It doesn’t take much to find a reason for someone to gamble, especially PCs.

Throughout April Dungeon’s Master is participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. The challenge is to write a new article ever day in April, excluding Sundays. That’s 26 articles over the course of the month. To make things even more interesting the title of each article will begin with a different letter of the alphabet. This year we’ve decided that every article will provide our readers with new adventure hooks. Today “G” is for gambling as we look at ways PCs can gamble or how others can gamble on them.

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Adventure Hooks DM Resources

Adventure Hooks: Warrior Needs Food, Badly!

a-to-z-2014-fVery few games I’ve ever played in or run spend much time worrying about what PCs eat, how frequently they eat, or where they get the food that sustains them. It’s not usually an interesting part of the game so we gloss over it. Obviously every living creature eats, but we just assume that meals happen behind the scenes. Food is not usually an important part of D&D. But it can be if we make it so.

Throughout April Dungeon’s Master is participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. The challenge is to write a new article ever day in April, excluding Sundays. That’s 26 articles over the course of the month. To make things even more interesting the title of each article will begin with a different letter of the alphabet. This year we’ve decided that every article will provide our readers with new adventure hooks. Today “F” is for Food as we share some adventure hooks to satisfy your hunger for ideas.

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Adventure Hooks DM Resources

Adventure Hooks: Elf Quest

a-to-z-2014-eWhen I first got into comic books back in the early 80s I couldn’t get enough Spider-man and Batman. As far as my 10-year-old self knew, Marvel and DC were the only companies making comics. So when I first saw a copy of Elf Quest in my cousin’s comic collection I was curious. Here was this black and white comic that was the same size as a magazine. It didn’t feature superheroes but it was full of fantasy creatures like the ones I’d read about in the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Could it be that I’d discovered an overlapping of my two geekiest hobbies? Absolutely!

Throughout April Dungeon’s Master is participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. The challenge is to write a new article ever day in April, excluding Sundays. That’s 26 articles over the course of the month. To make things even more interesting the title of each article will begin with a different letter of the alphabet. This year we’ve decided that every article will be provide our readers with new adventure hooks. Today “E” is for Elf Quest as we draw inspiration from one of my favourite comics to come up with today’s adventure hooks.

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Adventure Hooks DM Resources

Adventure Hooks: Here Be Dragons

a-to-z-2014-dDragons have always been an iconic monster in D&D, but far too often they get turned into boring quantities. They are the elemental-themed bosses that you make sure you have resistances against before confronting. They are the fighter planes of the D&D movie, big and damaging but ultimately forgettable. They are monsters whose stats fail to convey their majesty. But they don’t have to be.

Throughout April Dungeon’s Master is participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. The challenge is to write a new article ever day in April, excluding Sundays. That’s 26 articles over the course of the month. To make things even more interesting the title of each article will begin with a different letter of the alphabet. This year we’ve decided that every article will provide our readers with new adventure hooks. Today Joe Lastowski helps out the Dungeon’s Master team by sharing some great adventure hooks about Dragons.

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Adventure Hooks DM Resources

Adventure Hooks: Coins

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When civilized societies do away with the bartering system they turn to currency to make transactions easier. In D&D and most fantasy settings the currency of the land is coins. Gold pieces, silver pieces, and copper pieces are the traditional staples from which coins are cast, but each fantasy world will have coins made from whatever materials make sense. For example in Athas, the world of Dark Sun, metals are extremely rare so coins are made of ceramics.

Throughout April Dungeon’s Master is participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. The challenge is to write a new article ever day in April, excluding Sundays. That’s 26 articles over the course of the month. To make things even more interesting the title of each article will begin with a different letter of the alphabet. This year we’ve decided that every article will provide our readers with new adventure hooks. Today “C” is for coins as all the adventure hooks focus on currency.

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Adventure Hooks DM Resources

Adventure Hooks: Oh Baby

a-to-z-2014-bIn all the years I’ve been playing D&D very few characters in any of my adventuring parties have ever had kids. Even the PCs who live long and fruitful lives, adventuring into their old age and accumulating incredible amounts of wealth still don’t stop to settle down and have a family. It’s as if having kids in-game is a sign of weakness, or even a curse to your favourite PC. I suppose it’s because as soon as you say your character has people he cares about in his life the DM will use that against you.

Throughout April Dungeon’s Master is participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. The challenge is to write a new article ever day in April, excluding Sundays. That’s 26 articles over the course of the month. To make things even more interesting the title of each article will begin with a different letter of the alphabet. This year we’ve decided that every article will provide our readers with new adventure hooks. Today’s “B” adventure hooks all center around a baby in one way or another.

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Adventure Hooks DM Resources

Adventure Hooks: It Came From the Abyss!

a-to-z-2014-aIn D&D the Abyss is the place where Demons dwell. Some of the most fearsome, powerful, and iconic monsters in D&D call the Abyss home – Orcus, Demogorgon, and Lolth, for example (coincidentally all depicted on the covers of the 4e Monster Manuals). But for every named entity who’s managed to carve out a piece of the Abyss for themselves there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of lesser beings that make up the vast majority of denizens.

Throughout April Dungeon’s Master is participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. The challenge is to write a new article ever day in April, excluding Sundays. That’s 26 articles over the course of the month. To make things even more interesting the title of each article will begin with a different letter of the alphabet. This year we’ve decided that every article will provide our readers with new adventure hooks. Today’s “A” article features adventure hooks that tie in to the Abyss.

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DM Resources

Dungeon’s Master joins the 2014 Blogging from A to Z Challenge

a-to-z-2014-badgeIt’s that time of year again; time for the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. The challenge is to write a new article ever day in April, excluding Sundays. That’s 26 articles over the course of the month. To make things even more interesting the title or theme of each article will begin with a different letter of the alphabet. So on April 1 the article will begins with A, on April 2 it will begin with B, and so on all the way to the Z article on April 30.

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Editorial

The Blogging from A to Z Challenge – Dungeon’s Master Round-up

The 2013 Blogging from A to Z Challenge is over and we made it! We managed to get an article out every day in April (excluding Sundays) that began with a different letter of the alphabet. It was a lot of work (more than I expected), but in the end we did it.

Now that it’s over I wanted to provide a list of all the articles in one place. We managed to produce a lot of great articles in April and I wouldn’t want any of our readers to miss out. Below I’ve provided links to all 26 articles listed alphabetically from A to Z.

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DM Resources

Zombies: Breathing Life into an Overused Undead

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First it was Vampires. Then it was werewolves. Now the popular media seems obsessed with zombies. Where the Vampires and Werewolves got the Twilight treatment and were essentially emasculated by removing the fear factor, zombies for the most part have stayed true to their traditional monstrous selves that everyone’s come to know and expect.

Zombies are everywhere. AMC’s Walking Dead is one of the most popular shows on TV, and the comic that it’s based on is still going strong after 100 issues. It seems that there are more and more zombie novels on the shelves these days than ever before, and there have never been as many big-budget Hollywood movies featuring the undead menace as there are this year.

We’ve practically reached a point where zombies have become a cliché. They’re overused and dare I say it, are starting to bore us. After all, how many different ways can you tell a story that involves a zombie apocalypse? Well, that depends on how imaginative you are. The key to telling an interesting zombie story, or in the case of gamers, running an interesting zombie-themed camping, is to use an angle that we haven’t seen before or at least hasn’t been used to death.

Throughout April Dungeon’s Master is participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. The challenge is to write a new article ever day in April, excluding Sundays. That’s 26 articles over the course of the month. To make things even more interesting the title of each article will begin with a different letter of the alphabet. In our final article of the A to Z challenge “Z” is for Zombies.