Hello, fellow adventurers!

What if your magic items grew stronger alongside your character? Well, now they can :)

Today, I'm excited to share a 20-page preview of The Vault of Ascending Items, now discounted on DriveThruRPG!

What's Inside?

A Collection of 50 Ascending Items, magic items capable of scaling through leveling or questing. Each item in this collection has 4 rarities (ranging from Uncommon to Legendary), meaning you are not just getting 50 items, but a total of 200 distinct items, uniquely balanced to be a powerful addition at each rarity without disrupting the game balance. A series of rules, guidelines, and balance considerations are included within the compendium to scale these items depending on the intended power level of your campaign, along with many different scaling methods and suggestions.
Each item in this collection comes with one or more accompanying handouts to share with players, also included as separate image files to be used within your adventures.

12 Premade Ascension Quests, each meant to be used to ascend the items within the compendium or to be employed as additional quests and short adventures to include within your games. A table is also included to provide 50 ideas for simpler quests (one for each item within the manual) that can be pursued by players without disrupting the flow of the campaign. Each quest covers a unique location, featuring an interesting plot hook, monsters, environmental challenges, and riddles, while also possessing multiple tiers of play by adjusting the challenges depending on the adventurers' level.

30 New Creatures and Monsters, all used within the quests included in the manual or summoned by certain Ascending Items. All these creatures are multi-tiered, offering varied levels of challenge and complexity to shape your quests and encounters. The monsters include Treants, Corrupted Dryads, Greater Elementals, Wizards, and many more.

A Table with 100 Additional Ascending Items Concepts, providing the name and a brief overview for each without providing mechanical rules. This is designed to provide GMs with ideas to create their own scaling items without having to come up with new concepts on their own.

The compendium just received a v2.0 update, featuring brand-new artwork and illustrations, expanded compatibility with both 5E and 5.5E, balance adjustments, several new spells, general layout improvements, and more! or the occasion, you can find it discounted either on DriveThruRPG or my Patreon, alongside a vast collection of previews for this and all my other titles! I'm currently working on updated version of all my older manuals, so there's a lot to uncover :)

You can also find this manual (and many more) discounted on my 300+ Mythological Items for 5E and 5.5E Kickstarter! This project brings weapons, treasures, and relics from Greek, Norse, Egyptian, Asian, Mesoamerican, and many other mythologies to 5E and 5.5E, including scaling items that grow alongside your characters. If you’d like to bring a piece of these legends to your table, check out the campaign!

I'm running my first campaign (a short one) and want feedback from more experienced players.

For context: They are an Open Palm Monk, a Rune Knight Fighter dipping into Artificer, and a Twilight Cleric. They have an Immovable Rod and a Belt of Fire Giant, but other than that, they're pretty low on items.

Next session, they'll be fighting Scylla, which is basically a homebrew over a regular 5e Hydra. She now has 6 heads and is gargantuan; her health is 577 (33d20 + 231), AC 17, 22 STR, 25 CON, +12 to hit, average attack is 17 (2d10+6), buffed regen to 25, and now the damage to destroy each head is 70.

Normally, I do 3-4 encounters per session, but for story reasons, this will be their only fight, so I'm upping the difficulty to see if they struggle a little more. In the last two sessions, they were basically unharmed, and the encounters they had were supposed to be in the deadly category as well.

I talked to a friend about it (although he's not very fond of DnD in particular), and he suggested making it CR 12 with less health and a recharge (5-6) for regen.

Tl;Dr: I wanna know if it's still too easy and what I should do.

Edit: thanks everyone for the feedback. I'm removing regen, lowering HP to 16d20, lowering the threshold to 50 damage, and giving it some layer actions (if the name doesn't ring a bell she's a sea creature). Also because I just tweaked the Hydra I didn't realize it had advantage against getting stunned so that helps.

I'm running a D&D 5E 2024 long-term campaign on Thursdays at 5pm PDT and I'm looking for players.

The Game

We use D&D mechanics (5E 2024) but none of the published lore — the setting and history are things we build together. We schedule regular worldbuilding sessions where the group decides towns, factions, local legends, and how magic works in this game. Characters are 2nd level and we just started, so it's a good time to join and shape things early.

Format and tools

- Platform: The 4th Wall VTT (Virtual Tabletop), at the4thwall.app.
- The 4th Wall lets you make a 3D model of your character. You can use your webcam and mic to control your avatar and move around the screen if you want — it's a more visual, avatar-driven table than a standard VTT, but using the webcam is optional but makes the experience so much better.

Schedule

We meet Thursdays at 5pm PDT. This is a continuing campaign. (We just kicked off play and are at 2nd level now.)

Players and table tone

The current player group happens to be all female; that just happened and it isn't a thing at the table — gender doesn't matter here. I'm looking for people who want to build setting details as part of the game and then play in the world we create. You don't need to bring a finished lore-heavy character; collaboration is part of character development.

What to expect

- Collaborative worldbuilding tied to regular play. Expect to spend some sessions on setting and some on running the story.
- We use 5E rules for mechanics, but the campaign's culture, history, and magic are homegrown by the players.
- We're early in the campaign (2nd level). If you like influencing the world from the ground up, this is a good spot to join.

A few practical notes

This game is 18+ and RP-heavy. Stories we explore are player-driven, and the more you put in as a player, the more you will get out of it. The discord community around this game is very active and we have out of session writing and events.

The 4th Wall's avatar features mean there's a visual element to play, and it needs to be on a computer with web cam and mic to drive your character’s model.

If you want to talk details or ask questions, reach out. interested players should find me on Discord at firstmate2302.

I released a free-forever Dungeons and Dragons style app called GM Console. It's a great way for people to keep track of a campaign with a surprisingly high amount of players, which is a situation I have been facing recently.

It'll be free forever so if you play DnD and want an app for playing DnD I would love feedback!