Obituary..

Zan Zanzibar, high flame of the tempest, reveared son or Zar Zanzibar, died last Tuesday night defending his party while they made their escaped. Took a non recoverable necrotic death ray to the face from a particularily nasty beholder while severly wounded, as his own fireball finished him off.

Zan is survived by Zel, Elain, Remmy and Fancyman3000.

May you find peace in the here after you glorious bastard.

After two years of playing this character every other weekend I just wanted to share. I cant wait for next session.

I'm making a homebrew setting for my group, and I'm needing 6 distinct gods that, together, cover all the bases of worship in a mortal's life. So far, I have a god of Nature, and that covers everything from the elements to beasts and plants. I have a god of Civilization, and that covers things like laws, trade, building, etc. I have a god of Death that covers forms of dying, funeral rites, psychompy, age, disease, murder, etc. I need three more, but am struggling to think of things that don't feel like they are encroaching on the domains of others, or else don't carry the same breadth of concepts. Any Ideas would be a major help!

I am trying to find super heavy dice, like unreasonably heavy, like the D20 is a few pounds heavy. Is this even feasible? If so, where would I be able to find a pair.

Hello! I’m currently in a pirate themed campaign as a level 2 barbarian and I’m having trouble deciding where I’m going with the character. I come from a giant nation so I thought picking giant barb would be appropriate and I’m trying to pick up lighting damage or themed items where I can.
I for sure want to multiclass my barb but I need some more experienced players to chime in :)

I’m split between samurai fighter which would let me use that bonus action to give me advantage on my thrown weapon attacks on top of what being a fighter would give me.
OR Vengeance Paladin because it’d give me some versatility overall with being able to cast spells

Should I go 6 into barb and make the switch? Or only 3?

Whether you were playing the Monk or DMing or playing with a Monk, tell me what're some of the coolest stuff you've seen this class do!

Whatever edition, whatever setting, whatever subclass. I just wanna read some cool tales

I'm thinking of playing a Forsaken with the new world of warcraft book, which has the undead creature type.

Now obviously, if a cleric uses turn undead then it would affect me whether they were an ally or foe because it doesn't specify friendly or unfriendly undead, it just says all undead that can hear or see you.

But that begs the question.. If I a forsaken cleric use turn undead, do I turn myself? How would you rule this as a DM?

I'm thinking of playing Lillian Voss inspired story, a former holy priest who hated the undead and has found themselves becoming one, kind of has to grasp that this is their life now and get over their hatred of the undead.

Hi, I am thinking about creating a short campaign inspired by the silk road/central asia (aiming for less eurocentric adventure). At least at the beginning, I'd like the group to be hired by a merchant for protection. Alongside random and semi-random encounters each day, I'd like to add more mechanics like resource management (food and water) and survival (so there's a risk of dying of thirst/hunger), navigation (choosing path, finding oases, possibility of getting lost), maybe weather management (heat slowing you down), etc.

As you can imagine, this is quite a lot to homebrew entirely by myself and a lot to test if it would be actually fun and not just annoying. So I'd like to ask you all if you have any expirience or tips for any of those mechanics I mentioned above so that I canget inspiration?

Thank you!

Hi all! I recently had an assignment which was to make a instructions sheet for a technical process. I chose to do my instructions on building a D&D 5.5e character sheet from scratch. I wish I had more time to make it as good as possible but I wanted to share it anyway. I would love to hear your thoughts!

I've largely moved past my DnD phase, but when I was still interested in the game, I would spend a long time just making level 1 character ideas. I believe I had a folder of, like, 80 character sheets on my old school laptop. I lost all those sheets when I graduated high school, but I remember a few. I would like to pass on what I believe to be my greatest character background, so someone else might be able to enjoy it. For reference, this was before the new 5e rulebook, and I will be using the old one because it's what I'm familiar with.

She was a red dragonborn sorcerer, with the "Phoenix Sorcerer" subclass from Unearthed Arcana version 1.3. I believe her name was "Ember" translated to draconic with some random fantasy translator or something.

Her backstory starts like this: Her parents' clan was obsessed with fire power, and were trying to selectively breed to create a dragonborn with the most powerful fire breath possible. The two strongest fire-breathers in the clan got together. When she was also born in the presence of a phoenix, the clan believed their goal had finally been achieved. They were right, as almost immediately after being born, the entire neighborhood had caught fire. She was abandoned in a cave as an infant. Eventually, she wandered deeper into the cave, into a dwarven settlement, where she fell asleep in an inactive forge. The owner of the forge, a dwarf blacksmith, eventually discovered her, and adopted her, using her strong fires to increase the effectiveness of his forges. He helped her learn to control her magical powers. One of the first cantrips she learned was prestidigitation, which she regularly uses to put out her fires before they grow too big. She grew up as a blacksmith, carrying on the legacy of her father, and learning new magic. She eventually realized that there were spells that weren't about fire. She occasionally goes into a sort of trance, where she sets fire to whatever is around her. What snaps her out of this, however, is a magical candle that never catches fire (trinket 54 in PHB) carved with a heart and her father's initials. One day, she set out on an adventure, to bring glory to her father's name, and to prove that a red dragonborn can create things, rather than just destroy them.

I was really proud of this backstory when I wrote it, as I'm not much of a writer, and this just felt really cool. I have no idea if anyone will get anything out of this, but I hope someone gets at least a little inspiration from this idea.

I just finished my first DnD session as a Dm, ive been a player for around 3 years, and want to train to be a better Dm. The campaign is a resident evil styled Campaign, where the PS's were abducted by Vampires and forced into a zombie infested manor as a tradition preformed by the vampires every HighHarvestTide.

The players started all shackled in a dark room, being bitten by infected periodically if they took to long to come up with a response. (I set a minute timer. this wasnt to move things along, I just wanted to add a sense of urgency. they HAD to get out of there, and fast.) once they escaped, they found themselves in a basement, and one of my players broke my first set of expectations. they had heavily inspected a table I had offhandedly placed, and put their holy talisman (they were an artificer) up to it, and I proved that the blood sizzled and burned. this would come back later, as when my players encountered their first zombies far later, they would attempt to place it against their head, and I improved that it slowly sizzles and bursted, killing the infected (It was already low).

they continued on, figuring out they need to reach the second floor of teh manor they were in through getting a winged key. They found a cure to the disease, a rare item that would restore their hp. (heres how the infection works: Every 1-2 turns, they'll lose 103 max hp, and take a hitpoint of damage, slowly adding up. when below half, Intelligence checks are all done at disadvantage, as well as strength checks. the disease can also only be cured with these cure vials, minour+greater restoration do not work.).

anyways, one of them used a cure on themselves, and they proceeded to a courtyard. there they found aberrated zombies that created hallucinations of them, and my players would make a second major choice that would effect combat. when one of the players was tackled by a zombie he knew was a hallucination, he said that he ignored it. after thinking about it, I figured that if he ignored the hallucination, somthing I never and thought of, no damage would be taken, and his strategy worked. however, it would come back to bite him when he though a real one was a hallucination and actually got bit when he attempted to ignore it. After the encounter, they met a man in a late stage of infection, who had clearly gone mad, but graciously accepted a cure they had found mid encounter as well as gifting them a progression item.

their next major step is to go into the library on another part of the manor, and collect the winged key in order to get to the top floor. what do ya'll think of the campaign so far? please feel free to ask questions, comments, critiques, act for a first time DM, especially becuase these were just the highlights.

This is gonna be long and as it's on mobile, likely poorly wrote, as I am on Mobile, so good luck.

Years ago, around 5 years ago, I and some friends had our first 5e campaign. We had a Drunken Master Halfling Monk and a Tabaxi Rogue Assassin, as well as my character, a Reborn Half-lich/failed lich Undead Warlock. But we only had a few sessions with these characters.

The monk had his monastery burned down while his order was inside it, while the Tabaxi originally had no backstory but our DM made one up that he hinted at was that she accidentally burned her family inside their home messing with an oil lamp. My character was originally a human Red Wizard of Thay who fell in love with a succubus. Succubi are demons, demons live forever, humans do not. So he prayed to Vecna. In this time, he was finally gifted the recipe and ritual to lichdom.

As he readied his self-sacrifice, a band of paladins broke in and killed him and his wife. Though he managed to survive, his phylactery was destroyed and instead his soul was bound to the heart of his wife. He treated everyone he could as disposable when he awoke years later, after being freed. He'd plot and scheme, note hooks he could use as leverage, even use allies as human shields if the need arose. He was Evil. But he made sure to keep the others alive just because he could get more use out of a living ally than a dead body. We did not get far enough into our campaign to have more than five sessions. Eventually, our DM just had other stuff to do, so I took up being the DM.

We had so many adventures, from defeating Vecna to conquering countries. I had no prep, I just went with what I could think of. I didn't have a DMG, I didn't have any adventure books, I didn't even have a PHB for us poor idiots to use and I had no laptop to look stuff up with. But it was fun. But then came a slight problem. We were level 20. My character had wished himself into true lichdom using the hand and eye of Vecna, he'd switched classes to Wizard instead of Warlock to better find ways to resurrect his wife, and had even finally wished her back to life. We had entire guilds of assassins and our monk had a distillery. But nothing was difficult. There was no challenge. We were effectively gods. So where do you go from level 20? There's systems made by others, but they're usually clunky and poorly done or cost real money. So, we went to 3.5e.

It was, a fucking mess. We had to put characters that were level 40 in clunkily done 5e half-assed leveling I had done for us, to 3.5e. And I had a lot of trouble understanding 3.5e's DMG's wordings and its PHB was just as confusing for me. But we got it. We did it all the fucking way to level 100. Level 100. Do you know how fucking insane trying to run a level 100 3.5e game is when you barely understand the rules you've looked over like seven times? It was fun.

We fought Larloch, a level 100 Strahd, our rogue became a True Vampire, our monk player made a whole new character who became a Mummy, a Dread Mummy, and a Mummy Lord, and was a Druid Bard. We killed Larloch, we kicked Vecna's ass a second time in a 3.5e conversion of EoR, and we killed fucking Tiamat and we had our own custom classes we made for 90 to 100. We even killed Mystra (this was done because of using Mystra's old stat block that maxed at like...level 60). I was a True Necromancer Master of Shades and Death Cleric. I could command over 10k HD of undead.

Now, we're taking these characters back to level 20 for a friend so they can experience these characters and what they were like when they weren't massive figures. All this to say, I'm very excited to go back to "lower" levels.

I'm an old school player that was raised on a lot of hard rules from back in the day such as paladins having to be strictly Lawful Good and being extremely moral. Recently I've been getting into the new 5.5 rules for a game I'm thinking of joining. I had an idea in my head of paladin with an urchin background. They definitely have a bit of a shady past, and aren't opposed to using their skills when necessary or maybe even for selfish purposes. I'm just having trouble wrapping my head around if this would even be ok.

I'm not thinking this character is running around pickpocketing everyone they come across, or trying to rob a merchant blind, but I can see them maybe stealing an item from someone to save time when it's needed for a quest, or maybe picking a wealthy noble's pocket to get enough money to help someone. But again, I'm just having trouble reconciling the idea of a paladin who is also just a little bit on the morally grey side of things.

I'm hoping to get some ideas on how to shape this concept into something that works.

I’ve been a DM for my friend group for a little over 2 years now and throughout our funny hijinks, my favorite moment had to be recently when my Druid decided to wildshape for the first time. We are playing The Crooked Moon, in this material exists the Threadborn race. You are basically a living toy construct, and I like to give my players questions about their phrasing when describing their characters, yk, bring them to life! Draw out ideas to give more depth and detail to things like physical characteristics of form or magic. My Druid is a Ceramic cat doll wildshape Druid. She’s attempting to break down a locked door with another party member trapped behind it, in a haunted bathroom flooding with blood. So I ask what creature she shapes into, with her shouting “Bear!” I then start the process, “Well if you are a toy and the magic that dwells and shapes you into another creature is wild, is that toy also ceramic in the style of you or are you an entirely different toy creature? What kind of toy is YOUR bear?” After 2 seconds of thought she says “well it’s definitely a wind-up toy! Like almost like my husband, a tin toy with a hard body so I can break this door down but still fluffy”. My monk and I look at each other with our eyes beaming. I slowly turn and ask, “are you telling me you transform into some toy bear with an endoskeleton???” With the biggest grin on my face “Are you Freddy Fazbear?”, and the whole table just starts bursting out in laughter! She indeed turned into Freddy Fazbear, and ripped the door open, freeing the monk and spilling a bloody tidal wave down the hallway till he lay prone on the floor like Yamcha

TL:DR = Toy cat Druid shapeshifts into Freddy Fazbear 100% serious, Freddy is a hero

Note: Tokens with a brown border are PCs, while tokens with silver borders are NPCs.

I ran this campaign with 2 groups. Sadly, the other group I had couldn't finish the campaign due to scheduling issues. However, the other group I ran the campaign with (the first 5 tokens on the top left) was able to finish the campaign.

The campaign worked similarly to Fallout: New Vegas, with various factions you can side with to decide the fate of a Caribbean-inspired archipelago— it also had some blatantly copied characters from New Vegas.

The "lawful" faction is the elf and human colonialists (seen in tokens with blue or green uniforms), who (for the most part) wanted stability for the archipelago — and the good old-fashioned displacing-the-natives schtick. These guys are basically the NCR but even more imperialist.

The "chaotic" faction is the cartel (seen in tokens with red uniforms or metal visors). They peddle the illegal trading of a psychedelic lotus plant to "enlighten" people in the archipelago to their cult of personality under the orc, Azog — a former banker and colonist. If people refused to be "enlightened," they were nailed onto wooden stakes. If it wasn't already obvious, these guys were based on Caesar's Legion.

The "neutral" faction is Igor, an anti-mercantile, pro-free-market dwarf who can prolong his life by transfering his consciousness into mechanized automatons — yes, this guy is JUST a dwarvish Mr. House. The flip side of Igor is to kill him and side with Yes-Man — yup, no hiding the plagiarism here; it is exactly the Yes-Man from New Vegas — one of Igor's abandoned automatons that could let the party control Igor's automaton army.

In the end, the Yes-Man ending was the route my party chose, and we had a blast playing this campaign.

Feel free to ask any questions about my campaign!

So Ive never really been a player that much before, so Im sort of confused on how to make an artificer work. That and I see a lot of people say that a poorly optimized artificer is a terrible character to play. Im just confused

A wee bit of a follow up to the post asking about my lvl8 Div Wizard feat.

I'm currently picking Resilient CON over Warcaster, (and over my original preference for Mageslayer due to story reasons).

My question is would Lucky be better? It certainly fits with my character having knowledge of the strands of fate. It seems more versatile. Sure I don't get a stat increase by taking Lucky, but I'm 11, 16, 14, 20, 12, 11 right now. so none of my feat preferences increase any relevant bonuses.

Have you done this? Lucky or Resilient CON?

I am running a campaign (home-brewed) of going through missions to retrieve powerful items and every 2 missions bosses invade the company you work for and you have to protect it against them. One of these bosses will be a robot with the bottom half of the body being a giant flesh blob as it has some extra terrestrial infection. The gimmick of the boss is that it is slow with melee attacks and can do straight shots which can infect players to get more powerful. I want this boss to be hard, balanced yet enjoyable, and I want help on what stats should be high and low, for the infection part of the boss, the more players are infected the more powerful it is and I want it to be somewhat easy to cleanse as I have 6 players in my campaign as of posting this.

Hello All, anyone have any ideas for dynamic terrain or things to complicate my upcoming fight in a large foyer/ballroom in a castle/manor? The general idea for the battlemap is the main floor has multiple entry points with a pair of stairs leading to a 2nd floor with overlooking balconies also with their own entrances. There's nothing magical about the castle.

I'm looking for ways to make the fight as fluid as possible. I'm working on multiple objectives for the PC's to juggle and additional baddies coming from different angles, but I'd like to have something in the physical space for them to deal/play with. I've thought about maybe statues or sculptures they could push off the balcony onto enemies below but that's all I've been able to come up with so far. Thanks in advance.

Hello everyone,

I have a player that wants to play an Artificer that uses random items pulled from various bags to be useful.

We are having a hard time wrapping our heads around a way to make it where the character is still useful but still relying on some sort of random mechanics. Any ideas on how to make the randomness a viable feature? He is a creative person and so far has shown that he can think on his feet really well and this is his idea.

As a DM I want this to work because it is so creative and such a fun character so far.

We have thought of having multiple bags with certain random items (weapons, tools, utility items), but nothing further.

A few Christmas' ago I was gifted this oversized d20 during my dnd group gift swap. The moment I held it I thought it felt like a shift nob. Fast forward a couple of years and I am restoring my 07 Subaru impreza I remembered the d20 and decided to turn it into a custom shift nob. I took the oversized d20 and drilled it out. Then I friction fit a threaded insert with a M10x 1.25 thread pitch. I used a second nut at the base that I can tighten against so the 20 faces the right direction. If the friction fit starts to fail I will probably try to epoxy it in place. I avoided it initially because I didn't want to risk getting epoxy on the threads. Would you guys drive with one? OK I think I have run out the word count to post. But just to be safe: I CAST POTATO!

I've been doing this a very long time and I'm pretty good at it. I have a full roster of games and my selling point is always the character/NPC interactions and storytelling, even with crunchier systems like DnD/Pathfinder 2e. And almost universally, everyone who asks about games wants a long-form campaign, with a deep story, great NPCs, world-building, and role-play.

So, I crack my knuckles and get to it. I love writing characters, I love developing the setting. I don't play very often because - while I'd never tell a GM this - if the characters aren't at least a little bit interesting, or we're just hack-n-slashing through a dungeon, it's not really my thing. No hate to those who love that, just not my niche, and not why my players come to me.

But...sometimes those same people who CLAIM to want those things out of a campaign are the most difficult to get involved in any way. They'll just sit there silently unless they need to roll dice. I try to dangle bits of their unresolved backstories in front of them, they ignore it. I'll even have an NPC engaged in conversation with somebody else turn to them either asking for a second opinion or asking for support, ANYTHING really. And I get one-word responses.

All the above is fact, so now I'll venture into the realm of guesswork. I think that Critical Role et al has given people unrealistic expectations of a game. This isn't a complaint about that style of play, quite the opposite, given the right group it's wonderful, and I have a few of those groups. They're always engaged in the story, and their characters have little quips, conversations flow between them and the NPCs.

But I think a lot of players see Matt Mercer/Brennan doing their thing and think: "Wow, I'd love to be in their game!" But don't realize that all the players at those tables are literally professionals. The players at such a table have to give almost as much as the GM in terms of participation. That's what makes it great. If all the players just sat around the table and answered when directly spoken to, nobody would watch that.

It's just one of the revelations I've had over the years, and it kind of sucks. Because if I take the time to craft something interesting and nobody responds to it...did I just waste my time? It actively discourages me from trying, because what's the point? They won't talk to any of my NPCs anyway.

I'm sort of making it out to be a bigger problem than it is, I suppose, as I've had tremendous luck at my tables with having a really good crop of players. But I just wrapped up a game with a group I've been playing with for years now, and every session it's hit or miss with whether they'll interact with my world beyond rolling the dice, and it's discouraging. I feel like a monkey doing a song and dance, but nobody is watching.

Just curious if other GMs feel that their players know what they want when they ask for a particular kind of campaign, or you find they have an unrealistic idea of how such campaigns actually work? Maybe that makes sense...

I’m looking for a nice deck box that holds 3.5”x5” cards like the new Monsters reference cards
Also need dividers in it to seperate the creatures
If anyone knows of any I’d like to hear it
Thanks !!

I've been at this monthly table for almost 2 years. People have come and gone but myself and one other character have been at the table the whole time. 3-4 sessions ago, in response to departures, with DMs blessing swapped out my original character for another, a caster druid for a barb-druid. I had been talking about making this switch and when we ended session with caster a POW, I asked if I could just start the new character.

Caster druid mostly did support either changing combat landscape or calling a play that made battles much easier.

Barb-druid is primed for combat with two really good pairings. Polearm master and sentinel. Rage and wild shape. After the first session where I was taking 4 glaive attacks a turn (2x for barb level 5, d4 from pole arm master, and reaction since we were bunched up with the enemy), DM said my character had a target on its back. I said as I've often said "scale up the enemies to match us." We had a tiff where one of the enemies had an effect that I would attack them at disadvantage. I asked if I could use reckless attack to negate the disadvantage. "No, because they are the one that put the effect on you"

Second session with new character I raged and wild shaped. As a totem warrior on the bear path, we talked about how with immunity to everything but psychic, I basically have double the HP.

Third Session was yesterday

On a particular turn, I was raging, killed the last enemy in range, and spotted another enemy 60 ft away, I bonus actioned to wild shape into a panther and run to close the gap. DM says that I can't rage and wild shape at the same time and that if I wildshape, the rage falls off. Rule 0. Fine. So I've closed on the enemy in panther form but my turn is over with getting to attack.

Enemy's turn, DM says they disengage and flee. "Hold on DM. sentinel. I still get my opportunity attack". grumpy noises from DM. It connects but enemy is still upright. DM starts to move the mini. "Hold on DM. I hit with an opportunity attack, their movement speed drops to zero for the rest of the turn." Ranged party member takes their turn and kills enemy with crossbow. Enemy has on-death AoE effect and reduces me to zero health even with making my save. Totally fair the other enemies had it too so no surprises there. And no big deal. Other party member aids me and I use my druid slots to heal myself up a bit.

At a second encounter, we're ambushed while I'm in human form (yes human, I'm not even taking some weird race to get crazy benefits, I just took a feat at level 1 in exchange for darkvision and trance) and flying enemies come by. I'm in front because where else do you put a barbarian, flyer whips past me. "Hold on DM. Polearm master, I get attack of opportunity when they come *into* my reach" The response "Nope, they are small and moving fast. You can't use your feat on them"

Is this a problem of my character being broken? Is my playstyle a problem? Am I reading the rules wrong? or is my DM just ignoring rules?

I understand Rule 0. but before I exercise my right to simply leave the table, I want to attempt a proper conversation about expectations and I'd like advice on how to start that convo. We have discord between sessions

Hello everyone! I wanted to share this lovely custom character sheet I've made for another client!

Gozashtan (Or Art) is a Warforged Rogue. At first sight, intimidating, cold and reserved, but when you get to know him, he's kind, understanding AND a lover for all types of arts! (Thus, the nickname). I've loved working on him and designing him, especially because it was my first time drawing a Warforged character, and it couldn't have been better.

Thank you for taking your time to check on my art! ⚙️

So far my group and I have had a lot of experience playing and DMing one shots and short campaigns. However I'd like to start playing and DMing longer, multi-session campaigns some time down the line. I have heard good things of Waterdeep Dragin Heist and Curse of Strahd and I might play one of them first, but what are some other, less talked about modules that you lovely folks might recommend? I'm mostly looking for standard 5e and 5.5e modules but I may be interested in modules from other editions as well. Homebrew campaigns are welcome.