As War Grips The Land, A Group Of Warriors Band Together To Protect A Population Of Displaced Peasants

THINKING ABOUT the merging of sailors and ship that takes place in the act of sailing & how the ship becomes more and more human and the sailors become more and more mechanism until at some point it perfectly evens out & their bodies are enmeshed to the point there’s one great seamless living Body with many parts. thinking about how if it’s a warship the wood of the ship is absorbing the blood and sweat and tears of the sailors and the sailors are likewise absorbing elements of the ship. thinking about how they’ve both got ribs

Dare: The Glittering Reef: 

“While the dragon may long be dead, there’s more than one predator in these waters. You best be quick if you wish to claim your prize.“

Setup: Generations ago the crystal clear waters of the Ildathan coast ran red with blood, as a terrible archdrake terrorized the trade routes and savaged any merchant ship it caught eyes on. Known to locals as Hullraker, this beast would use its powerful claws to crack open the body of ships to gorge itself on sailors and treasure alike. 

While its a myth that dragons eat gold, they do sometimes devour valuable objects to spit up into their hordes later. This habbit would eventually lead to the drake’s defeat, as a group of clever pirates tired of the drake’s meddling caste a series of golden cannonballs, then hollowed them out and filled them with black powder, and an alchemical compound that would ignite after being exposed to the drake’s insides for some length of time.  Loading up a dummy ship with their deadly decoys and piles of coin as bait, they watched in glee as the drake’s belly exploded mid air, showering the sea with golden shrapnel and sending Hullraker plunging into the reef below. 

The Challenge: Since the time of its death, treasure hunters have paddled out to the glimmering reef in the hopes of  reclaiming a portion of the dragons last, fatal meal. Having stripped most of the upper reef clear of coins. Now after years of plundering only the strongest of divers can make it down to the dark, shark infested shelf of the reef where the dragon’s bones and the bulk of its treasure remains. Tradition is that each diver only takes a single coin, and while one gold piece isn’t much to an adventure, a “drowned queen” (one of the particular printing of coins the pirates used for the bulk of their bait) is a mighty prize among sailors and other folk of the sea, said to confer the luck and cunning of the pirates that took Hullraker down. 

CUTE Pathfinder 2e Character Sheets just dropped!! 🎉🎉🎉

Find them here!

Dungeon: The Shattered Garden

“ Careful not to cut yourself on all this Pretty” 

Adventure Hooks: 

Seeking a precious artifact, the party is force to make a harrowing climb up freezing, alpine mountains to gain access to a castle that was said to have fallen from the sky. Finding the ruins of this structure deep within a mountain rift, they must explore a labyrinth of jagged shards and broken halls, hoping that the whole beautiful calamity doesn’t cave in. 

What a miserable place for a heist. What treasure is so grand that it could make a self-respecting thief leave the poorly guarded vaults and easily duped nobles of the city, trudge halfway up a mountain, and risk freezing their precious lock-picking fingers off in the process? How about the Hyborian Stylus, a weapon of such power that any warmage worth their salt would pay out the nose for the chance at wielding it.  To get their hands on this treasure, the party will need to outwit an ostentatious but heinously bloodthirsty oni by the name of Banehail, who treats the dungeon as her own personal gallery/art instillation.

Sometimes things in the life of an adventurer are simple. You hear rumors that someone saw a castle made out of clouds crash-landing on a mountainside, you grab some friends, go on a hike, and investigate. Maybe you get eaten by wolves, maybe you grow as a person by confronting the unkown, it’s not that complicated. 

Challenges & Complications: 

Situated at the bottom of fissure high up in an alpine mountain range, the party will have to battle through harsh conditions to even get to the dungeon site, and then figure out a reliable way of getting down into the dungeon, ascending up with their prize, and finding their way back down the mountain. This may not prove too challenging to a party only interested in stealing one or two items from the dungeon, but the Garden is filled with numerous, weighty treasures, all of which can slow the party’s escape. 

While some rooms and pockets of surrounding architecture survived the impact unscathed, most were either reduced to reduced to piles of jagged detritus or so structurally compromised that they might as well be uninhabitable. The party must test their caving skills, managing tight squeezes through once beatific galleries or prepare descents into wings that now slope at treacherous angles. Delicate floors crack like glass under the party’s treasure-laden footstep, and ceilings may at any time collapse into razors if too much damage is done to the surrounding rooms. 

Entering the Shattered garden is no protection from the chill outside, as harsh boreal winds surge through particular hallways and seek to rip the life-giving heat from a potential explorer’s bones. THe greatest of these dangers is gallery which contains the Hyborian Stylus itself, which may freeze characters solid if they linger in it too long. If the alarm is sounded, the elemental denizens of this dungeon may paradoxically open the doors to this most valuable of treasures, transforming the Shattered Garden into an indoor blizzard in the hopes of flushing out the warm-blooded intruders. 

This dungeon is part of a larger adventure path “A Kingdom Washed Away”, which you can find the rest of @dailyadventureprompts​

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What are some ttrpg's on your game wish list? Ones that you'd want to play or plan to play (or maybe don't have time to). also as a side note your love for ttrpg's fills me with a lot of joy and reminds me why they're so special! : )

Inevitable: COWBOY KNIGHTS TRAGEDY this is number one i wanna play this so bad with a crew who will watch a few anti-westerns and arthurian films beforehand and fully commit to the tragedy aspect (big bold decisions if you know it ends in tragedy!) oh my god this specific flavor of game appeals to me a little too specifically

some kind of horror game. VTM, Curse of Strahd, Shadow of the Demon Lord, Call of Cthulhu, whatever lends itself to horror well. the horror genre is one of my favorites and i would so be down to play some good horror!!

MASKS as a PC!

and always more dnd.

uhhh I'm sure there would be other things but I don't know many ttrpgs off the top of my head. quite like ttrpgs. would very much like to play more. especially with a group of artists who will post dodoles and songs that remind them of characters and talk about them throughout the week and do psychological deep dives and theorize about the story and themes and and and

Variant Classes Pt. 1

With the continued expansion of 5e through new subclasses and races, the ability to create new unique characters continues to grow. Though, in my mind, one of the faults to this is that, every time you make a new subclass or such, it's just 1 more character archetype, which can sometimes feel a little lacking in terms of new possibilities.

Now of course, there's the option to just make a lot of content, which was the style of older editions, but that eventually lead to the issue of content bloat, with there just being too much content for a single person to reasonably deal with.

Though recently in my own homebrewing, I've found what I feel is a pretty good solution for such a thing: Multiplicative, rather than additive content.

This was the idea behind my Prestige Classes document, with each single prestige class being designed to be applicable to a wide number of classes at any time, meaning that with each PrC, each would add a new potential character option for each class it could interact with (or even 1 for each subclass).

So, long rambling on thought processes, Variant Classes. The idea for this is to, by adding one new class, add new character options equal to the number of subclasses a class already had, essentially being a x2.

Variant Classes are new classes that modify an existing class to varying degrees, replacing some or many of their features with new ones, creating a whole new character option. It's sorta like a Tasha optional feature, but the optional feature messes with your entire class.

So above, there are the two Variant Classes of this post: The Archivist and the Eldritch Sage

The Archivist takes inspiration from a 3rd edition class of the same game. They are scholarly mages, though they focus on divine magic rather than arcane. As such, mechanically they are very similar to the wizard (Even having a spellbook equivalent in their 'Prayerbook'), but differing from them is their spell list: rather than the wizard list, they use the Cleric list.

In comparison to the Cleric, the way they interact with spells is a bit different. The Cleric has access to their entire spell list for free, alongside their domain spells. The Archivist however, needs to learn spells, only gaining 3 per level and needing to pay for more. To make up for this is their Domain Studies, in which they initially learn a set of Cleric domain spells of their choice. At later levels however, they can learn additional diving domains, and choose which set of domain spells to prepare from each day. Yet later they even gain the ability to prepare two domains at once.

As such, while a Cleric will often have to focus on a single theme when it comes to their spells, an Archivist is more a multi-tool, able to have a wide number of domains and prepare whichever they might need for a given day.

The Eldritch Sage is a researcher into the otherworldly. They like Wizards use their intellect to fuel their magic, but rather than from direct study of the arcane, their application of magic comes from the study of the extraplanar.

Mechanically, the eldritch Sage is a warlock, with their patron instead representing ehat type of otherworldly entity they focus their research upon. Unlike the regular warlock, they use Int instead of Cha. Most differently is that they use regular Spellcasting rather than the warlocks Pact Magic, making them more of a traditional long rest based caster.

The Eldritch Sage also interacts with Invocations differently. Rather than having a number of invocations at will they instead learn a number of invocations, and can prepare a few of them at the end of a long rest. This means that they will often have more total invocations, but less active invocations.

Woops yeah, lots of text today.

Ah, you may have noticed the Pt.1 at the top of the post! That's because I actually made 4 variant classes, it's just that the other 2 will be posted seperately (very much my own choice, totally not because tumblr didn't like me dropping 20 pages into here). So yeah, I guess look forward to seeing in maybe a few days time the Mentalist and the Mountebank.

Honestly imo they're more my favourite out of the bunch, being the more radical in their changes to their classes. (Or maybe it's bias, since I am in the process of playtesting both of them in campaigns I'm in x) )

Edit: oh hell I forgot to put in the art credits, since they were all part of the images originally, but they'd be on the last page of the second set. My bad

Art credits:

Archivist.

- Clever Distraction from Innistrad: Crimson Vow by Andrew Mar

- Conspiracy Theorist from Strixhaven by Svetlin Velinov

Eldritch Sage.

- Contact Other Plane from Adventures in the Forgotten Realms by Alix Branwyn

- Magus of the Moon MtG from Time Spiral Remastered by Milivoj Ceran

Edit: Part 2 is up, and can be found here

A bard subclass designed for a pirate world, though this subclass could be very strong anywhere. With its own version of eldritch blast, the College of the Sea has just as good of a defense as an offense.

Like my work? You can support me on patreon here or buy the pdfs pwyw on kofi!

Edit: ^^ Gave it some changes thanks to homebrew-a-la-traumaverse‘s advice, hope y’all like it!

So this is a cheat-sheet I’ve made for personal use to just have an overview over all the basic D&D rules. The first page covers most of the text rules. The color divides the sections more or less from one another.

The second page covers most of the important tables and stats, that you’ll probably need through the game. Hope you like it and find some use for this! Cheers.

i think reframing 'writing a campaign' or 'writing a plot' as writing beats has dramatically changed the quality of my dming. for me personally, i work best when i have a world with pieces that would be moving (regardless of whether the players would be there but obviously, you put the players in the crosshairs to effect change) and plan each 2-4 sessions as its own small story and i've developed a method that really works for me that i use for oneshots, mini campaigns, and in arcs for longer games.

[ID: a screenshot of a bullet point list with template headers: Location, Framing Plot (subheaders Social, Exploration, and Combat), Key NPCS, World Plot Progression, Player Hooks (subheaders repeating Player to be replaced with a PC's name)]

to further explain:

Location(s) — where the sessions will likely take place, so I have a manageable list of places to develop further in terms of worldbuilding.

Framing Plot — What is happening, what is the inciting the incident and what are the things the players cannot control. Then the subheaders are the three tiers of play. I think it's important to have an idea to tap into all of them or lean heavier into what your party is interested in but consider all of them for fun and exciting Mechanical gameplay as well as story and roleplay.

Key NPCS — Who are the NPCS that are going to be important to the framing and to the players. This is usually just a handful.

World Plot Progression — How does / how will the events of this scenario push forward what your players are working towards?

Player Hooks — Specific thoughts for how to connect the framing plot to each player character and make each player feel invested and like their choices matter.

and that's what I do to plot out my games. It's never "this is how things will resolve" it is, "this is what the situation is and this is how i want to connect my players to it and see what they do"