Introduction

Welcome to the blog.

I am Taliesin, also known as Arparrabiosa, and for the past 20 years, I have devoted a great deal of time and effort to playing and running Dungeons & Dragons. Over these two decades, I have gained experience in campaign design, game mastering, and creating homebrew worlds that might be useful to you. In addition to my direct experience, I have also studied numerous sources and resources, such as The Alexandrian, Sly Flourish, or Matt Colville’s YouTube channel, among many others, which have shaped and enriched my understanding of the game. The purpose of this blog is to share that experience with you in an organized way, providing ideas, tools, and useful advice, whether you’re a player or a game master, and no matter if you play D&D or another system.

What will you find in this blog?

Game Master Tips: I’ll explain how to plan everything from short adventures to long campaigns.
Published Content Analysis: I’ll examine commercial modules and offer recommendations on how to adapt them to the specific circumstances of your table.
Worldbuilding: I’ll guide you through the process of creating your own world, using my own, Ezora, as a practical example of worldbuilding.
Original Material: I’ll share original adventures, encounters, and backstory elements, ready to use and designed to be easily integrated into any campaign.

I hope you find ideas here that enrich your games, whether you're just starting out or have years of experience in roleplaying. From here on out, we’ll explore different facets of the game together, always with the intention of learning and honing our skills.

Taliesin

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Favourites of the Comunity

Chardaukan Hexcrawl: Adapting Fever Swamp

In this series of articles, I will guide you through the process of designing a sandbox hexcrawl, illustrating each step with Chardauka, one of the continents of my world. Throughout these articles, I will cover both adventure content creation to populate the hexes and the worldbuilding elements that bring the setting to lif e. Portada de Fever Swamp, por Andrew Walter «The air is moist. The moisture mixes with your sweat—the heat is relentless. The drone of insects gives you headaches, and the fever from the infected wounds has left you delirious. Your raft is damaged, and there are spirits in the trees.You’ve only been here for three days.» Fever Swamp is an adventure written by Luke Gearing for Lamentations of the Flame Princess and published in 2017. Gearing is also the author of the renowned Wolves upon the Coast . The module in question, which you can purchase here , is a small sandbox hexcrawl set in a swamp. Its content is evocative and original, with descriptions that i...

Chardaukan Hexcrawl: an Introduction

In this series of articles, I will guide you through the process of designing a sandbox hexcrawl, using Chardauka, one of the continents in my world, as a case study. Throughout these articles, we’ll tackle both adventure content creation to fill the hexes and the worldbuilding elements that bring the setting to life. As I mentioned in another article, the first step in designing your hexcrawl is to have a hex map. If you’re looking for tips on how to create one, you can check out my advice in the article Drawing a Hexmap . Once we have the initial draft of our hex map, the next step is to decide on your players’ base of operations. For my Chardaukan hexcrawl, I’ve chosen the city of Garampur for this purpose. This decision aligns with my interest in deepening the lore of its culture and its strategic location near the center of the hex map, granting players greater freedom to decide which region to explore. I chose a scale of 1 hex = 12 miles, imagining that traveling on foot ...

Scale and Size of Your Sandbox

When designing a sandbox (or any project, really), one of the first key decisions is defining its size and scale: how large will it be, and how much detail will it contain? This point can range from a single city with its surroundings, a frontier barony, a chain of islands, to two kingdoms on the brink of war. Having a clear idea of the conceptual size allows us to organize our work, and one of the most useful tools for this is the hexagonal map (hereafter referred to as a hexmap), which helps us size the game world according to the number of hexes and their scale (conceptually defined, as I will explain later). The size and scale of a sandbox are deliberate decisions that determine its nature and are generally inversely proportional. A good example of a small but highly detailed sandbox is Evils of Illmire , which consists of only 19 hexes detailing the surroundings of a village. In this case, each hex features its own dungeon and presents a high level of interconnection, allowing...