For the past few months, I have been running the Descent into Avernus campaign module. With the holidays and various scheduling conflicts, we had gone from being able to meet biweekly to meeting no-weekly. Luckily, January has been way better for us being able to get together, which has allowed us to finally finish Chapter 1. I would like to share my experiences running the game, as well as the experiences shared with me from the players so you can learn from my successes and failures.

Hey folks, CGM is taking the holidays off. Join us on Discord for updates. We will be back in January!

Cheers!

Hey folks. Dirk here reviewing the new published adventure by Wizards of the Coast: Descent into Avernus. You’re welcome to read the full review or skip to the bottom for my final statements and consensus. This is going to be a first impressions review. My opinion may change as I run this campaign in the coming weeks. I am going to try to avoid spoilers as much as possible, with the understanding that the adventure has been officially published since 9⁄17 and, hopefully, some of you have already gotten your hands on a copy.

Welcome to this months homebrew! This one is a favorite of mine every since Wizards of the Coast published The Book of Nine Swords. Yes, I will be taking a reprieve of the Magnetism thing for the time being because I am extremely excited to showcase the work we at Critical Game Mastery has put together. A friend of mine will be playing this class and providing live feedback while I run the Descent into Avernus game.

Welcome back to the second part of our World Building mini-series! This article assumes you read July 2019’s article on World Building: Setting the Stage, however, you will still be able to follow along with this article even if you haven’t read it because these aren’t necessarily meant to be an exact Step-by-Step process for everyone. It is my / our process, but that does not mean it has to be yours.

Welcome back, everyone! This is the second part of our series on Magnetism. I hope you checked out our first article, aptly named Part 1, where I published the Magnetized Condition. The spells I will be showing you today are built upon this Magnetized Condition. We had a blast preparing and testing these spells out and I hope you do as well. For now, the spells go from 0 to 5th and there is a total of 10.

This is the first part of a multi part series on world building. Here, I will lay out my foundational steps with some examples to help illustrate my point. I hope what I will share with you will be something you can use for your own games in the future. A Primer on World Building At first when you think of World building you are getting nervous, and perhaps a little intimidated.

Hey folks. Dirk here. I’ve been working on making some spells, items and subclasses based around Magnetism. This is partly because Magneto is my favorite X-Men villain and partly because magnets are super cool. I’m going to be releasing my work in pieces to help keep things organized and coherent, as well as give me the time to properly playtest my work with the groups I play with. This first post is the Magnetized Condition, which is the cornerstone of effectively implementing Magnetism-themed magic and subclasses.

Let’s talk about character development (name drop). Have you ever made an NPC, or for you pretty players out there, met an NPC, that you wanted to like but you just… couldn’t? What about one that was so memorable that you and your friends joke about it as an inside joke or reference him/her/it for YEARS afterwards?! A lot of the time, these memorable NPCs are founded in humorous anecdotes.

Welcome to Critical Game Mastery! This is a project many years in the making that has been delayed for a myriad of reasons, some of them were semi-reasonable ones. Our goal here is to present the combined years of practice and experience at being Game Masters and players for tabletop role playing games, including the world’s greatest: Dungeons & Dragons. Much of our content will be released via a monthly article written by one of our staff.