I’m a little late with the video this week but today I give you the Sand Giant for 5th edition. These tribal giants are very strong and can be deadly using the right tactics.
Alone they are weak, but together they are deadly. Take on this species of monstrosity which possesses a special type of hivemind which allows them to share adaptations with one another!
Adamantine juggernauts are a specialized golem, created to be more than just a guardian or weapon, they must be instilled with a willing soul who keeps all memory and personality they had in life. This allows them to be martial masters, cunning tacticians, and potent leaders. They are capable of using magic items and on occasions even rarer than the creation of one of these powerful entities, cast spells if they were a caster in life, although they must reteach themselves or otherwise relearn.
Physically they resemble a massive humanoid in blue armor wielding a flail and shield larger than an average person, made of the same metal as themselves. In the event of one being able to cast spells, they ignore the somatic components of a spell and use their shield as the spellcasting focus. They stand five times as tall as humans and weigh 200 times as much, totaling around 32,000 lbs.
what’s dnd without cute critters? here’s some quick token art I made for my game - Figment, Ioun’s homunculus, and Charles, a Smoat, which are three foot tall awakened stoats that help maintain Ioun’s archive and come in fun pastel colors because why not
sheesh! i got so busy i haven’t posted art in a thousand years. this here’s a darling one shot character of mine - Miss Delphine Haruspex, a Reborn aberrant mind sorcerer whose overbearing charlatan of a stage mother has positioned her as a medium and conduit of spirits.
If we lose the light of Hestia, we lose everything. A world without forgiveness is a world not worth saving. He must not have her. I will not allow it.
- Hecate, 4 Hallowroot of the year 4728
Excerpt from A Brief History of Il Umbral
The people of Il Umbral will not soon forget the treachery of the Tidesage Khadgim Lath, who sought to summon an avatar of the Keeper and bring about the downfall of the gods, nor his defeat by the impossible cooperation of benevolent Hestia and unknowable Hecate, goddess of secrets. The Mistmaw swelled from the south, plunging the island into Hecate’s domain, thereby allowing the goddess Hestia to step from Mount Celestia into the beleaguered city, severed as it was from the Material Plane by Hecate’s intercession. Accounts vary of the events that led to the defeat of Khadgim Lath and the servants of the Dark 6, but all agree that Hecate, who until this time, had never taken interest in the affairs or welfare of mortals, struck the final blow in defense of Hestia, whom he sought to corrupt as he had the city. When the deed was done, the Mistmaw receded, though many feared Hecate would claim the city forever as recompense for her aid, freeing Il Umbral and its people. Thus, it is to her and to Hestia both, that the Temple of Redemption is dedicated, that both goddesses might retain some small domain here, and cast their combined gaze favorably upon us.
So the party might have thwarted my evil plans in the absolute best way possible…and reconciled two goddesses in the process. Hoo boy! Can’t wait to see what comes of all this!
more npc art for my campaign from forever ago - Ser Concord Whitbane (they/them), foremost paladin of Dol Arrah in the Coastal Concordat - born in the Nine Hells, with origins otherwise shrouded in mystery, they work tirelessly to combat the corruption of the Dark 6 spreading across the Material Plane, and spare some time in between to make sure the party eats a balanced breakfast.
staying home sick means i finally have time to post art i did ages ago - here’s a mostly finished party portrait for @abrooks12‘s new campaign (in the same setting as Mak and Ekk, many years later!) We’ve got the dynamic satyr sibling tag-team arena fighting team of Nikitos (fighter, npc) and Ariadni (my rogue) and charming cowgirl half-drow bard, Kass ( @locoszabo)
between the three of them, they have an intelligence modifier of +0 lmao. send help.
the baddies in Baldur’s Gate better not make the mistake of messing with the cleric, or they’ll have one seriously cheesed off barbarian/paladin chopping her way through them faster than you can say ‘zariel’s a punk bitch’
aka, we’re playing BG:DIA with Nyrah and Elasha and it’s fantastic
Gold-winged angel Go home, don’t tell Anyone what you are You’re sacred and they’re starved And their art is getting dark And there you are to tear apart
billie eilish // goldwing
here’s hoping the Nightspeaker and Sehanine Moonbow can keep the Mockery in check long enough for the party to save the world!
I talk a lot on this blog about constructing better stories, but I frequently forget to talk about what I call “Tableskills”, those parts of the DM’s craft that are less about formulating plots and laying out narratives than they are relating those narratives to the people around the table. The thing is, teaching tableskills is a lot harder than just suggesting ideas about stories that could be told, as every DM or prospective DM has their own particular type of storytelling that they’ll grow into as they master the art. As such, there’s no hard and fast rubric I can pass down, only the things that have improved my own performances over time.
The basics: The DM Narrator Loop
I’ve been playing d&d for well over two decades now, and I’ve never heard the DM’s art summed up any better than this video by VOX: Describe, Decide, Roll.
You as the DM Describe what situation the party is in and ask them what do they do next ( in a very leading tone, pulling them forward or offering them direct choices)
The players Decide among themselves what they’re going to do, with clarifying input as needed.
If anything needs to be decided by dice, youRolland figure out the outcome, then you snap right back to the descritption phase.
Keep doing this and your party will be guided along your storiy at a steady clip while having a lot of fun. Keep rolling to when it’s really important, and you’ll be doing just fine.
All Killer No Filler
The most basic trick I’ve learned for tabletop storytelling is asking yourself “ what’s the most interesting thing that could happen this session “ and then telling a story abouthow the party gets from where they are to where that interesting thing happens. Sometimes that interesting thing kicks down their door and forces them to react, other times it doesn’t quite happen on time, and you need to elude to the fact that it’s about to happen next time they play. Sometimes your players will take the initiative upon themselves to make interesting things happen, ranging from deep roleplay moments to taking an unexpected narrative turn and throwing all your plotting out the window. Learn to love when this happens, but don’t rely on it. Players should be given the spotlight when they stand up and take it, but that doesn’t mean you should shove them on stage before they’re ready.
Because you’re running a live session and thus have limited “screen time” in which your interesting thing might happen, you should focus on scenes that push the party forward, building narrative momentum while offering the party a chance to break off and do their own thing. “Does anyone want to do anything before we X” and variations of it is your best ally here, as including a pending time limit spurs the party to act before circumstances change while also giving them a direction to fall back on when they don’t want to make a decision. This is where radically open world/hands off DMs fail, because the players showed up expecting to be part if a story rather than entirety making their own fun while a friend if theirs silently chides them for not pretending to be an elf good enough. TLDR:Always be moving towards something interesting happening inside the session, but never be afraid to detour when it looks like your party is going to do your job for you.
Economy of Information
I often have a problem with expressing my ideas to other people because I either trip over myself trying to get out all the data required at once, or I leave people hanging because I presume they can infer what comes next. Naturally this is a trait I’ve had to train out of myself when I’m being a dungeonmaster and I did that by studying a bit of cinematography. Movies are not subtle about how they want you to feel at any given moment: If the audience is supposed to be on edge, the surroundings are eerie and the music is discordant, if you’re supposed to like a character they’ll either be reminiscent of a wholesome archetype or the camera will deliberately show them doing something nice. Don’t sweat the details when you’re describing a scene or doing background world building, paint in wide strokes and then fill in the details as necessary. Likewise, don’t let your scenes dawdle, bake in a reason why the scene is going to end before too long and use that as a ticking clock to spur your party into action.
When in doubt, be a Cartoon
As gritty as some people like their tabletop roleplaying, at the end of the day it’s just a big game of pretend, and in my experience the best way to tap into my player’s emotional base is to engage the sense of play they’ve been fostering since they were kids. Unsure how to describe something? Picture how it’d look in a disney movie and your word-picture will come across clearer in your player’s minds. Not yet confident enough to RP a nuanced NPC? Overact like a caricature of who you’re pretending to be, and you’ll suddenly have a lot more wiggle room to play with. However gritty some people profess to like their tabletop gaming it’s all a big game of pretend in the end, and the way you engage your party’s emotional core is by appealing to that sense of play they’ve been holding on to since they were a kid.
Follow the Fun
It took me a while to realize that “fun” was like oil in the engine of any d&d game, and that the primary job of the storyteller was ensuring that it was properly circulating throughout the session. Not enough fun? whole thing grinds to a halt and playing feels like pulling teeth. Too many sessions like that and a campaign falls apart. It takes a bit of practice as a DM, but try to be attentive for when fun “bleeds out” of your campaign. Players beating their head against a puzzle? Skip it, try a different sort of puzzle next time. Someone doesn't’ enjoy shopping trips? give em something to do while the rest of the party is perusing. Combat bogging everyone down? Experiment with techniques to make it snappier. Keep up this mindset and your games will be pumping along like a precision engineered machine.
Fail Faster
I’ve listened to this video so many times I could probably repeat it as liturgy. Just like any performance art, the main metric for advancement is realizing where you’re doing poorly and then figuring out ways to improve upon them. Sooner you figure out what you’re doing on and why, the sooner you can try out ways to fix them, and the sooner you can find things that works. Take on an experimental attitude towards your own works, if something is hard: find a way around it that works for you.
Hovering beyond the reach of mortals and beneath the notice of gods, this eerily tranquil wasteland awaits those who would explore its mysteries and discover the fate of a vanished pantheon.
Gods die, this is known, as their fossilized bodies are sometimes found floating in the astral sea or interred in great monuments hidden throughout the cosmos. Sometimes they are slain by other gods, or die as part of their own mythology, or shift and reoccur as new deities as the people who they are pledged to go through ideological changes.
This does not explain the absence of the gods that built the palace moon, a demiplane hanging just outside the material realm in much the same way that a regular moon might orbit a celestial body. In its time it was a hanging garden, a lush green paradise where one might lounge in mountain sized castles and observe the goings on of the material plane, basking in riches and radiance and all the splendor their divine might could conjure. Today the moon is a dust-riven wasteland, with its halls and city sized gardens smothered under colorless particulate with those remaining edifices exposed to the air slowly being worn away by time. It is a land ripe for exploration, as the relics of divinity lay scattered among the towering pagodas and basilicas covered with petrified ivory, amounting to not only the treasures of unknown gods but to the flotsam of various celestial courts and clergies born to serve the now absent divinities. It is for this reason that both scholarsandterrible warlords choose to make the Palace moon their home, sifting through the rubble of the dead world in the hopes of finding some fossilized trace of the ineffable.
Hooks:
The a powerful druid who’s influence once kept the region stable has gone missing investigating strange omens from a set of ancient megaliths contained within the foundations of an overgrown temple. As tensions between the region’s factions escalate, those who would seek peace reach out to the party to find her and bring her back. After delving the dangerous ruins (and having to overcome some of the druid’s on defenses along with the local critters) they discover her journal. In attempting to stabilize the ruin, the druid activated some kind of portal and pulled something through, after which the party can deduce that whatever it is she summoned dragged her back with it before the portal closed. Their only hope of rescuing the peacekeeper is to retrace her steps, activate the portal and plunge through themselves, surviving the lunar wasteland and get her back, all before war breaks out at home.
In the light of the full moon, the silver inlaid skull of a particular aasimar possesses the power to teleport those holding it to a graveyard on the moon, the spirit of it’s departed owner desperate to return to the land from which it was banished. A fortune hunting thief has purchased this skull from an occultist, and has been using it to loot the graves of the celestial court and turn a tidy profit. The players might find a few of these objects in the local magic shops, with a chance to trace them back to their source.
Seeking visions of the divine, a group of mystics cast their mind out to the aether and were cursed with visions of the lunar tomb palace. Extracting from this foreboding omen that the true gods of their world were dead, and all others were merely invading presences, they set about forming a heretical order and stirring up no end of trouble, even after their deaths. These followers of the Lunatic’s Canto can be responsible for all manner of blasphemous crimes across the realm, eventually drawing the party into one of their moon mad rituals the way that cultist are wont to do.
Further Adventures:
It’s up to you whether the palace moon is one of the ACTUAL moons of your campaign world, or whether it exists in a parallel space to one of those satellites, the way olympus as unreachable home of the gods existed parallel to the quite scalable mountain in the Grecian countryside. If it’s the latter, then the Palace Moon may only be accessible by specialized rituals and at particular times of the year, then the palace is accessible to anyone with a strong enough teleport spell, making it a great “ staring you in the face since level 1″ twist to where the villian has their lair.
Not to play into the old “ That Wizard came from the Moon” meme, but the moon really is an underexploited place for weird monsters to come from, ranging from old classics like mooncalf , or stranger aberrations that have taken up residence on the moon’s marble halls (thanks @thirdtofifthand@dm-tuz). Let your party enjoy a bit of flash-gordon weirdness, you know you want to! Plus it’s also a good home for angels and other godly beings to hang out that’s not so distant as the afterlife.
The vanished pantheon of the Palace moon is a great way to explain “ Silent gods” in your campaign world, regions that are cut off from the divine while others are in communion with their gods and have a LOT to say about that fact. Likewise, a partymember with Aasimar heritage may be descended from one of the celestial courts that dwelt on the palace moon, escaping to the world below after their masters left.
“If you don’t like how it’s done, do it yourself” is very bad advice for someone with a god complex
Setup:In life, the mage Varner of Boltzford was fascinated with the complexity of the world, the seemingly infinite inter-connectivity of all things in a web so complex that one mortal mind could never understand all of it. In death fascination transformed into obsession, as Varner was driven to extend his existence to perfect what he saw as the art of the gods: Genesis, the act of bringing life out of nothingness.
Decades of experiments with astral constructs and transmutation eventually led Varner into the a philosophical and theological haze of “ontology” and “ideal forms”, along with a lot of other prattle that allowed him to convince himself that the things he could create things so beautiful they could redefine beauty, so perfect they could improve on perfection, and so real that they made other things less real by comparison.
He created the Renascent Tome, an artifact that ate up the matter of the existent world to produce things that adhred to Varner’s vision of perfection, small things at first that were mere pretty trinkets, through which he learned that the more he wanted form his creation the more he had to feed it
It was shortly after the lich turned an entire town and its surrounding valley into dust that Varner fell victim to the bane of so many promising omnicidal visionaries: meddling adventurers. The heroes did what heroes did best and though they made a proper mess out of the perfectionist’s plans they were unable to keep hold of his Tome, which slipped through their grasp to cause problems in the wider world to this day, diminished in power but no less a threat.
Hooks:
Varner went through a number of research facilities/evil lairs in his time before he was felled by heroes, and any one of them could be a resting place for his tome. Such lairs are often dumping grounds for the lich’s escaped or failed experiments: creatures and constructs so beautiful they sear or corrode things around them, eerily stagnant wilderness, the soulless progeny of attempted “master races”. Such oddities would draw all sorts of adventurers, or at least the collectors and conservationists looking to study these anomalies.
A foolish and famehungry apprentice found the Renascent Tome at his local book fair being sold ( at a discount no less) by an unwitting salvager. After discovering its ability to transmute things into idealized forms, he began using the book to mend broken objects and “heal” local livestock ( no matter the fact that things the book abzorbs are effectively disintegrated with a new thing made in their place). Tales of his wondrous talents reached the ear of the ailing local countess, who requested the apprentice bathe her in the books healing light and restore her to the glory she once possessed. Now her lands are ruled by a nightmarish “perfected” tyrant, and patrolled by her inhumanly “idealized” soldiers. The thing that took the countess’s place brings the captive apprentice out from his cell every week or so to illuminate her increasingly crystalline castle, each interaction getting crueler and more alien.
Cultists of an outergod dedicated to ego destroying perfection have come to see Varner’s work as a holy relic of their faith, allowing them to perform miracles that they could have never dreamed of otherwise. They seek it always, putting a target on the party’s back should they come into possession of the Renascent Tome. When pushed to extremes, these same cultists will unleash the relic’s power without any heed for who or what it consumes, gleefully sacrificing themselves to become the foundation of the world it will create.
Item stats: The Renascent Tome
artifact
Dormant: while dormant the tome serves as a +1 arcane spellcasting focus.
A creature attuned to the Renascent tome gains the 2nd level wizard school feature: Minor Conjuration, save that the items created always have a +1 magical bonus to any rolls they were intended to make. Conjuration wizards treat both the focus and the items conjured as if they were a +2 bonus instead.
When this feature is activated, the book’s pages glow and begin siphoning in dust and small unattended objects from its surroundings. The effect is otherwise harmless.
Awakened:When awakened, the Renascent tome gains 10 charges, which may be used to cast the following spells: Discorperating light (1 charge as tasha’s caustic brew, but dealing radiant damage) Conjure Barrage ( 3 charges) or Fabricate (4 charges). Items created by the fabricate spell are of exquisite quality and retain the +1 magical bonus from the minor conjuration feature. The tome regains 1d6+4 charges at dawn. When the last charge is spent, roll a d20, on a 1 the tome consumes itself in a blast of siphoning radiance. All creatures in a 20ft radius must make a save vs the bearer’s spell save dc ( or int+proff if they are not a caster) or suffer the effects of a successful gravity sinkhole spell
Exalted: The bonus the focus provides grows to +3 and the tome gains 10 extra charges. The spells that it can cast now include disintegrate ( 6 charges), mirage arcane ( 7 charges) and blade of disaster (9 charges). Spells can still be cast if the item lacks the prerequisite charges, but this increases the number rolled on the no charge roll to go up by 1 per missing charge.
Curse: Once exalted, Each spell cast from the book now also requires an extra 1d4 charges. If the no charge roll occurs, in addition to triggering a gravity sinkhole, the Tome begins to act as a sphere of annihilation from that moment onwards.
Further Adventures:
Removing the curse from the Renascent Tome requires access to Varner’s research notes, requiring the party to either seek out a source of great knowledge of attempt to seek the imprisoned lich himself.
Varner has had a lot of time to think after he was imprisoned, and has concluded that the current material world is too corrupt and messy for any of his perfect creations to truly take root. Though his reemergence into the land of the living will bring with it a tide of new horrific experiments and dangerous objects released upon the world, his ultimate goal is to find a nice enough place to use as raw material for the eden he’s going to build. Given that he’s spent long enough as a lich that many of his own feelings have begun to atrophy, he’ll reach out to those closest to him ( like the meddling adventuring party that woke him up) to see what they think of as ideal. Say, the starting town of the campaign or wherever the heroes have decided to make their home.
Should the Renascent tome fulfill its purpose it’s safe to say that the party will have very little chance of undoing what its done, muchless surviving the process should they have been caught within its mile wide blast radius. However, with the slightest bit of divine intervention from whatever spirits are watching over their adventures, the party might just be able to turn that slim chance into a fighting one. They find themselves trapped inside the grotesque Perfection of Varner’s world, a grotesque parody of a place familiar to them with all the personality and imperfection scrubbed away. At its center is the Tome, its own less than perfect existence protected by an enchantment Varner made to protect his magnum opus from devouring itself in an act of sentimental self sabotage. The perfect world is contained inside the book while the book is contained within the world, this paradox, if inverted, might allow the party to reverse the flow of the Tome’s reality devouring magic, deconstructing the demiplane it’s constructed and reassembling the world that was in mostly the right order. All that’s required is to brave the maze of hyper-real nostalga and face off against a perfected Varner, alive again after a near century of lichdom, ignorant of any of his previous failings, but master of his domain.
Never try to cheat a dragon, not only are they sore losers, whatever game you’re playing you’re playing it by their rules.
Hooks
Having traveled to Port Sweldin in order to catch a ship, the party get to enjoy a few days enjoying the picturesque beachtown while waiting for a vessel known to be traveling to their destination. Sweldin boasts of lively boardwalk amusements, charming market streets, and a thriving artist community that caters to both tourists and wealthy folk summering
All seems to be going well until early on the morning of their fourth day when the party assembles to see their ship come in only to watch as it suddenly begins to sink out in the harbor. Rescue boats are dispatched ( which the party may be pressganged into) but the effort is interrupted when a grey scaled dragon launches from the waters below and delivers an ultimatum to those gathered to watch the chaos: His name is Xemplaris, and he is there to claim their shore by right of challenge as the town once challenged him long ago. Before he leaves, he claims that he will sink any ship he sees out on the water, throwing Sweldin into chaos and preventing the party from reaching their long sought destination.
No one has any idea how the port managed to anger a dragon, but when the party investigates a few miles up the shore they find that the chalenge they’re expected to meet him in is not combat, but an elaborate game. Xemplaris has smoothed out the beach and drawn in a grid, arranging his side of it with large stones and giant shells. Apparently he expects the party to source their own pieces before he tells them the rules, which will require them to go savaging above and below the tideline to find the assortment of oversized tokens needed to compete. The dragon will take great amusement in this, and may engage them in conversation as they thrash about in the surf. during which they may be able to piece together why the beast is doing all this beyond just draconic greed.
Setup: Several hundred years ago, Beryl Sweldin was a dwarven huckster entrepreneur in search of his next con venture, after being chased out to the coast after his most recent scam enterprise went belly up. Born the son of an imperial scout and surveyor, Sweldin knew a good patch of land when he saw it, and stumbled across a stretch of shore that with a little dredging and other sorts of management would make a fine deepwater port. The only problem was that this stretch of land was inhabitted by a young dragon, who’d grown up alone among the dunes, lairing in the shell of some massive sea-beast that’d long ago died on the beach. Already large enough to pose a threat, Sweldin cozied up to the young Xemplaris, offering him shiny trinkets to earn his trust and persuading the innocent creature that he was a friend. After that, the draogn was just another mark, and Sweldin was going to fleece him of everything he had. Sweldin devised a game and taught it to the dragon, wagering coins and baubles along each match and instilling the young wyrm with an undersanding that games like these were binding and one must always abide by their outcome. Naturally Sweldin was cheating, adding more rules and complications to the game each time that the dragon could get caught up in. After half a year of this grift, Seldin eventually tricked Xemplaris into wagering the entire beach and the giant shell which served as his home, and when the little dragon lost he went away weeping.
After that it was easy for Sweldin to bilk a few inverters into his new project, as deepwater ports were sure to be big business. His grand house still sits on a hill overlooking what he made, its floors and couryard tiled with fragments from a great leviathan’s shell hauled up from the shore.
The Shore game is played in an 8x8 grid, with players taking turns to deploy their pieces anywhere across the first three rows infront of them. The game is often played in sand, and while the grid should be as straight as possible the topography does not need to be even.
Pieces are as follows:
8 roundish stones, all the same color: the main playing piece of the game, these pieces can only be moved two squares at a time. They can also be “flicked” at another piece to remove it from play. If the stone lands its hit, the struck piece is removed and the stone stays in, taking the removed piece’s postion ,were as if flies off the board without making contact it is considered out. Xemplaris requires stones for his game to be large enough for HIM to flick, meaning that for the average humanoid they are improvised weapons with a range increment of 5/15
4 tall shells: These pieces serve as the primary goals of the game, with a player losing once all 4 of their shells have been knocked down. These Shells cannot be moved once placed, and after they fall, no piece can be placed on the spaces into 2 spaces into which they have fallen. Xemplaris uses the figureheads of different ships he’s salvaged as his point counters, and is very proud of them.
2 Flat shells: These shells move like chess knights, leaping over other pieces. If they land on an enemy piece (including a tall shell) that piece is out, but if they land on a friendly stone, that stone is protected and cannot be taken if struck ( the flat shell needs to be struck first to remove it). Xemplaris uses giant chunks of coral for these pieces.
1 Stick: The stick is three grid spaces long can be placed wherever the owner wants it provided there is not another piece in the way, including digging it into the sand at an angle. The stick is not removed when it is struck by stones, and stones cannot be placed into spaces the stick occupies ( though the flat shell can still remove it). Xemplaris uses an entire driftwood trunk as his stick.
2 Shiny tokens: Not placed on the board, these tokens amount to an attempted “do over” allowing you to retake a shot or force an opponent to retake one of theirs. If the do-over is successful, the one who called for the do-over has to give the other player one of their tokens. Regardless of the outcome of the game, whoever’s holding the tokens keeps them after the game is over. Xemplaris’s tokens are a pair of shimmering gems, and expects the party to ante something equally valuable which may require them to haggle with a jewler back in port. The dragon will also allow one of the challengers to ante their eyes in place of tokens, taking vindictive pleasure in making them wager something precious to them.
The players take turns moving two of their pieces at a time, though only the roundish stones can be used twice in the same round ( first moving, then flicking). Play ends when one player has all their pointy shells knocked over, or when both players are out of stones to toss, in which case the player with the most pointy shells standing wins. in the event of a tie, the player with the most tokens wins, after which the game is a draw.
Further Adventures:
The world was not kind to Xemplaris after he was evicted, and for centuries the dragon has nursed a shameful sorrow that slowly transmuted into hate when he matured and realized the dwarf had cheated him. Deeply hurt and fixated on winning his home back, the dragon has spent years codifying Sweldin’s nonsense game into something he considers fair, subconsciously convinced that if he could beat the long dead huckster he could undo the hurt he suffered after losing his home and fending for himself in the wider world. His wager is simple: if he loses, he won’t destroy the port in an act of draconic wrath. If he wins: The port is his, and everyone else needs to leave or risk being burned alive. Xemplaris sees this as justice for the exile he was forced to endure, nevermind how unbalanced the scales might be.
With his new found fortune, Sweldin married into the prosperous Stouthull clan, and used their combined influences over the newly forming town to invest heavily in shipping. The vessel the party were set to sail on belonged to the Stouthulls, which gives Sweldin’s decendants a perfect excuse to aim the party at Xemplaris in order to buy time to rally their defences and secure their assets. They knew the dragon was coming after all, Sweldin had told his children about the centuries long graceperiod he’d gotten the dragon to agree on before their next “rematch” and it was kept as family secret while they prepared various countermeasures. The Stouthulls promise the party a fortune to just kill the dragon if they can, or delay long enough for them to ready wyrmkilling construct and enchanted balista they’d had prepared for just such an occasion.
If Xemplaris loses his game, he’ll fly into a rage, a half millennia of regret pouring through him and spurring him to rampage through town, tearing apart buildings desperate to find the shell that was once his only shelter. If the party can’t talk him down, they or the Stouthulls will have to kill him, being hailed for heroes in their part but always being haunted by the wyrm’s last words: “ It’s not fair, I just wanted my home back, It’s not fair, It’s not fair”
If the party do manage to talk Xemplaris down ( what port city wouldn’t want to have a draconic protector on the naval payroll?) and eventually return to Port Sweldin, they’ll find that the populace has gone a bit mad for the Shore Game, playing a table-sized version on the boardwalk and at the biweekly tournament hosted outside the dragon’s new beachside lair. The heroes will of course have made an enemy of the Southull clan but honestly, who’d pick a pack of greedy, murderous merchants over having a boardgame playing dragon friend?
Sorrow pervades this valley, the painful ache that remains after tears and screams have exhausted themselves and the body can only linger on in faltering surrender. You can feel it in the rain, in the rocks, in the chill of the wind as it pulls the mirth from your bones.
Setup: Forlorn and forgotten thought it may be, the Veiled palace was said to have been constructed by a besotted celestial and played home to a succession of demigod warlords before it and the surrounding lands were reclaimed by nature at the end of the last civil war, transforming into a vast hinterland ripe for exploration.
Hooks:
Though the warlords have been gone for generations, their most cunning servants, a coterie of assassins live on, location concealed by ancient enchantments that cloak their fortress and their movements in near impenetrable mist. They now sell their services to the innumerable nobles and merchants of the lowlands as the “Serpent-Unseen”, a group the party will only hear of after taking an innocuous job that sees their prospective employer killed half way through and the party hastily pinned for the crime.
In addition to the isolated human villages in mountains, there are also encalves of aarakocra and jaguar-tabaxi in the region, both of whom retain scraps of lore about the palace and its formation, but have become increasingly unfriendly towards outsiders of late. Someone has been wandering their territory and ensnaring their people through the use of a bewitching flute, and all those who try to rescue the ensorceled are never heard from again.
Tales in local roadhouses tell of Tamha, a long vanished village in the mountains that once traded in heavenly treasures, some beautiful or powerful beyond beleif. While these rumors may incite the party to start combing the rainforest for trinkets, they’ve also inspired the Serpent-Unseen’s latest leader, Janbek the collector, aspirations for his organization far above being petty cutthroats. Having found a few of these trinkets ( such as the flute), the collector realizes that the Veiled palace is a storehouse of powerful enchantments that could lead him and his people to true power far beyond the swords and poisons they currently wield.
Those traveling high into the mountains should be wary, as to hear the locals tell it a soaking wet ghost that appears wandering the roads in the area dazed and confused, bloodless save for the silvery ichor which drips down from a bone-bearing gash in his head. As the ghost story goes, should the specter clasp you in his deathly grip, you’ll start to drown on land, all while he pleads with you to help him find his way home, dissolving into tears should his victim fight their way free.
Background:As the story goes, the celestial noble Rindal’jar was traveling the mortal world admiring the beauty of the mountains when he fell in love with a mortal girl from a tiny little village by name of Sya. This was a problem, as Rindal’jar was already married to the local goddess of rain, and so cloaked the surrounding valley in a never ending mist so as to hide the affair from his betrothed. Rindal’jar likewise concealed his true nature from his beau, claiming to be a wandering noble in search of poetic inspiration as he lavished gifts upon her and her people. Sya for her part figured out Rindal’jar’s ruse when such gifts icnluded bundles of gold or a bridge over a valley she was forced to cross every time she went to gather fruit, but she and her people were poor, and she feared offending this fanciful stranger and all the power he seemed to wield. The affair continued for years, and eventually saw Sya living like royalty in a palace conjured by Rindal’jar, waited upon by a staff of animals transmuted into servants: brilliant birds for her ladies and courtiers and a pack of leopards for her honor guard. Her people were forced to stay in the village below, but she smuggled them whatever riches she could to trade for food and proper tools. Having long suspected her husband’s unfaithfulness, the goddess of rain eventually used her trusted agents to track him to the valley, giving them a bronze vessel empowered by years of bitter hurt and resentment to unleash upon him when he was alone in the valley. Unstoppered the vessel unleashed monsoon storms and flooded the valley in an instant, washing away the unfaithful Rindal’jar as well as Sya’s village in an instant of divine spite. Watching from above and hidden by the palace’s enchantments, Sya watched her people destroyed, and afterwords retreated to the depths of the palace, living out the rest of her life like a ghost. Her and Rindal’jar’s children, raised by magical convenience and their sorrow-broken mother came up spoiled and wrong, eventually declaring themselves as warlords and raising successive bands of jaguar folk and mountain bandits as they use their father’s gifts to carve out territory for themselves. This pattern persisted over generations, until Rindal’jar’s line got tangled up in a brutal civil war and ended up extinguished for their troubles, their territory falling back to the wild.
Further Adventures:
Once and orphan and petty thief, the aasimar Janbek (perhaps correctly) sees himself as the heir to the warlords’ legacy, feeling pulled to collect the trinkets and treasures a celestial noble carelessly bestowed upon a hapless village girl so long ago. While many of these trinkets are merely valuable, others possess powerful abilities that have gone long unobserved, but seem to blossom in the collector’s grasp allowing him to ascend the ranks of the Serpent Unseen faster than anyone in the organization’s history. His ultimate goal is to uncover the origin of these wonders, and bring the valley under his control as a new reigning warlord to which surrounding territories must offer their allegiance. To this end the party may end up doing battle with Janbek over treasures they do not know the true origin of, or even inadvertently passing a few into his hands in the early game.
Of all the magical items scattered throughout the hinterlands and the surrounding region, perhaps the most dangerous is the stormbearing vessel, which was washed downstream and into the plunge of a violent waterfall and stuck in the rubble beneath the crashing water ever since. The party may only come to know of the vessel thanks to the locals telling them the sad story of Rindal’Jar’s transgressions, and connecting it with their earlier ghost sightings.
If one held the wrathful vessel, one could bring rains in times of drought, or summon hurricanes to ravage armies and scour fleets at sea. One could even use it to summon the wrathful goddess, which Janbek may attempt to do if the party closes in on him. What this scornful rain-god will do with the descendant of her philandering husband is anyone’s guess, perhaps smite him on the spot or take him as a consort, elevating him to terrible power. The gods are inscrutable after all, and it would be impious to try to predict how they would act next.
Ok, this one has probably been one of the longest projects I have ever worked on compared to the final scope. Back in, what 2019? I released a Supplement called “Clockwork Dragon’s Expanded Armory” to serve as a replacement and expansion for the core weapons tables, and address some of my biggest pet peeves about the general “sameness” of weapons. But an armory contains more than just weapons, and that initial release was always lacking suitable Armor to go along with the other tools of war I had carefully stated up.
I had always planned to add armor to the supplement, but actually tackling the project turned out to be a lot more easily said than done. You see, 5e relies on this thing called “bounded AC” which means you can’t just start adding higher AC bonusses to the game without making players effectively unhittable. I also had this idea in my head for a system more like what I experienced back in 4e, where armor wasn’t sold as distinct sets, and instead, you could have various pieces of armor, such as helmets, chest plates, and grieves that collectively decided your AC, but each of which could have individual enchantments and bonusses. None of which could really be achieved using 5e’s existing AC system
I worked for probably about a year and a half developing a complete defense rework for the game, which split Armor Score and Defense Score into separate statistics, with armor adding damage reduction, and Defense Score deciding how hard you were to actually hit. At one point, It included a re-design of how speed was determined. I divided up armor sets into 3-5 separate pieces, which could be mixed and matched, with individual weaknesses and resistances for each piece of a set. Then I spent a good 6 months playtesting it, both on my own, and with any group that found the idea intriguing. And believe it or not It worked.
Unfortunately, there were so many nuances and details to the system I had devised, that it just…. didn’t feel like 5e anymore. It was playable, and even fun - once you got the hang of it - but just felt like too much weight on top of a relatively simple tabletop system. So in the end, I decided to scrap nearly two years of work and playtesting, and start over with the goal of keeping things simple, but still interesting.
The result it what you see here. No heavy rewrite, no piece-meal armor system, just the simple addition of resistance and vulnerabilities that each set of armor conveys to it’s wearer. I also made sure to keep most of the interesting new types of armor i had developed, and explored the idea that some types of armor might even grant *advantage* to stealth checks instead of just disadvantage. In the end, I’m actually really happy with how it turned out - just not as happy with how long it took to get here.
I still think my more complicated defense system has merit, and I haven’t seen anything else that works quite like it, so I’m going to keep it in my back pocket for that new tabletop system I’ve always wanted to write. Maybe if I get a wild hair, or enough interest from the community, I will post my work on it sometime. but that is a project for another day.
As usual, the preview images above are low resolution, and does not contain everything. For the latest high-resolution PDF, as well as a whole host of other work I have done, check out this handy dropbox link, containing all of my published content. The armor you see above is part of My Expanded Armory supplement.
If you like what I do and want to support me or just generally help out, Check out my Patreonpage, or throw some coin at me through Paypal.me. If you wanna just come say hi on my Discord, that’s great too!
RPG extracurriculars. Rather than picking one path to build your character, at each level you can choose minor powers and abilities. I think this could work in a “realistic” game like Call of Cthulhu (we’ll call it 8e, the Less Crunchy Edition). Or if you’re looking for a game that exists, the FATE system will let you play this kind of malleable character.
Actually a concept I’ve been quietly working on for the past few years. I’ve dubbed it the “colligate” system:
Each level you get 3-5 credits (depending on the level). You can spend them on anything from ASI’s to a variety of feats, which have costs and prerequisites based on what they do.
Rather than your class determining your features/skills, classes are a set of requirements that can be filled by a range of feats and other things (such as ability scores, skill bonusses, speed, or ac). If you meet the requirements for a class, you are considered to be that class, and gain access to additional feats that have that class as a prerequisite.
Obviously, this is meant to mirror the way college credits work in earning a degree (except, you know, classes actually mean something). And it makes character creation and leveling significantly more flexible and creative.
It’s hard to keep track of without computer assistance though (just like college credits, who would have guessed?). And because there is so much flexibility, there is definitely a lot of room for both ineffective and overpowered builds. My goal with writing the features is to keep them all relatively balanced, but to do so, I have to consider how they might interact with literally every other feature.
so needless to say, it’s taking a while to get anywhere
Hey all, as some of you may know, one of the reasons I haven’t published as much content the past year or so is because I have been working on an NSFW content supplement for the adult D&D server I run (we all gotta have hobbies, right?). I don’t plan on doing much cross promotion, since I don’t want to flood my fans on this blog with NSFW content they haven’t asked for, but if you are at all interested, I just released the core ruleset for my Lewd supplement over on My Other Blog.
Aside from just Naughty Homebrew, the other blog is going to be a platform for me to post some adult fiction, and even highlight the work of other people on my Adult server. If that sounds cool, give me a follow there, and maybe even swing by to join Celia’s Lewd Dungeon for some NSFW roleplay and adventure (Age verification required)
If none of that is your bag, That’s Cool!
I still plan to continue posting and creating SFW content here, and with this first major release of the Lewd Rulebook, You can expect that to be relatively soon! I’ve even finally got finances situated enough to start commissioning custom artwork for some of my content, so expect some updates with that here in the near future too.
now, if you will excuse me, I have some alternate curse rules and a new race currently sitting open on my desktop that i need to finish up. Anyone ever wanted to play a Vulture Bee?
The Aeramanu are a refined and regal race of birdfolk, steeped in the occult tradition of their homeland. They are also one of the most important peoples in my Aetheros Campaign Setting, not least of all by the hand of one Victor Allen Stein - A former inquisitor that brought down, not only the church itself, but the very gods that once ruled over his world.
I’ve been struggling since before I even created this race to find just the right artwork for Victor Stein - My eccentric necromancer who managed to steal the throne of the nine hells from Asmodeus himself. So when I realized that I finally had the income to start properly commissioning artists for unique art to fill out my content, Stein was first on my list of characters to give focus on.
I have to give a huge shout out to @multid0rk for this Amazing character art (I still need to properly commission a background, rather than). I’ve been working with them on a number of character pieces like this, and they are quickly becoming my sortof resident artist for all of my homebrew. Definitely expect to see more of their work here in the future!
As usual, the Preview here is low resolution. For the high-resolution PDF, as well as My Expanded armory which contains a number of new shields, check out this handy dropbox link.And be sure to tell me what you think!
If you like what I do and want to support me or just generally help out, Check out my PatreonorKo-Fi pages, or throw some coin at me through Paypal.me.If you wanna just come say hi on my Discord,that’s great too!
