Sean Does Games

Here's another gnome NPC to use in your campaigns. Enjoy! Sourwind Hedskor (sour-WIND HEAD-score) “Separately, any one of these components could strip the skin off your face in a heartbeat. Combine them in exact proportions and you get a bracing beverage that will tickle your nose and make you the life of any party. Wait! Did I already add the toe-wort?" Sourwind (NG) is an awkward, 52-year-old, female rock gnome who channels the energy that most gnomes spend on socializing, eating, and pranking into alchemical research and experimentation instead. She runs a cluttered alchemist’s shop called Potions Plus where she concocts a variety of intoxicants, restoratives, fragrances, and other alchemical curiosities. Some are effective. Some are hokum. A small number are quite popular and always in demand. Almost all were accidental discoveries. Sourwind and her siblings all suffer from silent but particularly foul flatulence, the unfortunate result of an unwise prank he...

Image credit: Joel Thomas, Races of Stone , Copyright Wizards of the Coast (2004) I really enjoy the D&D 5e combat system. It’s streamlined, easy, and quick. Perhaps more importantly, a character has a host of options at his/her disposal for actions to take. It’s only drawback is that play time can be taken up waiting for players (myself included) to decide what they’re going to do next. The same can be said of the magic system (though some classes, for me at least, seem more complicated than others). Having played through numerous fight sequences, there is one glaring shortcoming that I can’t get past. All of those options really are isolated to a single character engaged in a single action that they take by themselves on their own turn. There is very little available in the way of character cooperation during combat. Sure, there’s Pack Tactics, Sneak Attack, and a few other features available to some creatures and classes but these are mechanics that offer passive bon...