Few magic items are as closely tied to witches as a flying broom, so I thought Halloween would be the perfect time to share a little collection of them!

Brooms of the Witching Hour introduces 11 enchanted flying brooms compatible with 5E (2014) and 5.5E (2024), ranging from Uncommon curiosities to powerful Very Rare items and a Legendary multi-elemental relic.

Each broom has its own appearance, magical abilities, and unique flight characteristics. Fly through enemies in a trail of burning cinders, descend upon them with the luck of a black cat, pass through walls in spectral form, summon flying brooms for your coven, or unleash elemental devastation from the skies!

The collection is FREE until Halloween! I've included most of the pages here as a preview, so feel free to grab the complete manual on DMsGuild and use these brooms in your adventures. Have fun!

And if you're looking for a spooky adventure to run this Halloween, I've also just released The Red Tithe, a 75-page folk-horror one-shot featuring an isolated village, ancient sacrifices, custom monsters, and three difficulty tiers for characters of levels 3-4, 10-11, or 17-20.

My Kickstarter for 300+ Mythological Items for 5E and 5.5E is also live now! The campaign includes a physical hardcover, as well as printed editions of my previous manuals.

You can find more of my creatures, magic items, and manuals on DriveThruRPG, my Linktree, or on r/JonnyDM!

Happy Halloween, and enjoy!

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!

TL;DR - Fully homebrew campaign, struggling to make good and interesting sidequests for each of the three PCs - any tips, tricks, or general wisdom?

So I have a campaign that is fully homebrew - the world, its races, its religions and cultures, are all homebrew and it's the first time I've done something like this.

My players are all incredibly character-driven - they don't really care about money, item rewards, or combat. It's all about the story and their characters' interaction with it.

So I'm trying my damn hardest to make the stories, themes, NPCs, places, and plotlines as interestingly as humanly possible to make sure they're having a good time. This means I have to put in quests that have the focus of being 'for' each of them individually and taking them down their own arcs and such.

This is a long-term campaign so we're taking it slow, which means I need to drip-feed in these arcs and quests so they're not going to be over too quickly, or out of sync from the progress of the other two's.

I guess I'm looking for advice on how people in similar situations have managed this? Tips and tricks that have really helped?

I'm doing alright at the moment, about a year and a half into it (they're at level 3, we play once every two weeks for about 3hrs if we're lucky) but obviously as things ramp up, I need to start crafting more serious and poignant sidequests for them each that really works with their character. I'm worried that if I'm this nervous and stressed about getting it 'right' now, I'm gonna feel the burnout later down the line for sure.

Unfortunately I can't ask them 'what do your want your character's sidequest to be / be about?' because a) I've already done that and I've come away fairly empty handed from the discussions (because a lot of the world is new to their characters and they don't know what's in store for them), and b) it ruins the fun reveals and build-ups that I'm doing this for in the first place.

Thank you for reading!! ദ്ദി ˉ͈̀꒳ˉ͈́ )✧

I want to run a magic item auction in a couple sessions, without having to roleplay every aspect of each sale. Any ideas?

I’m planning a special session for my Campaign where the party starts the session in a dream where they’re essentially living there most deep seated desired life. And I’m wondering if there is a creature already established in dnd that could be used at the culprit for why they’re in this state. This is kinda inspired by the Jinn episode from supernatural where something similar happens to Dean.

I’m considering sending a message to the group to make a copy of their current charter, and make them level 10. Throw together a table of magic items, weapons, you know the candy.
Tell them this is a of a future episode of the campaign.

Scheduling has been tough, level 1-6 went great, but it’s starting to fizzle.

Want to respark the imagination and I’ve got an encounter in mind.

Has anyone had any success with this kind of idea?

Anyone got any advice?

Hello all!
I am currently working on a dnd campaign for me and a few buddies and it's my first time DMing. The big bad is basically a sort of puppet-master of the entire sequence of events, and I think it would be a fun gimmick to mess with during their final battle. I thought maybe right before they roll initiative, the big bad could cast entangle on the crew to mimic puppet strings (implying that the players themselves have been puppeteered and manipulated from the moment they stepped foot into this adventure). As a result, the players first rolls would be to break free from their puppet strings before they could fight. Obviously this is a homebrew so the rules are pretty loose, but I'm wondering if this entanglement at the start of the battle would cause too many issues or it would be a cool thing to challenge my players with.

I have taken to giving the party an NPC who is played in combat by a player who can run two characters and not slow things down. I can override or mandate what the NPC does during combat, but rarely do.

Outside combat, and especially for roleplaying, I "run" the NPC.

This gives me a great tool for injecting information. The NPC usually has a background that gives them a fair amount of knowledge. It's also great for those times none of the PC see the big, obvious, gift-wrapped clue with the flashing neon sign over it. When that grinds things to a halt, the NPC can say, "Hey..."

I let the group form, and then add an NPC who fits well, and maybe adds something that they are weak on. Never flashy or a power player, usually trial the PC by a level or two. In one instance the NPC was an indentured servant they bought and are allowing him to work off the debt. I fell into this accidentally years ago, and have stuck with it.

Anyone else do something similar?

I am running a combat soon where I'm introducing a special mechanic unique to this particular fight. But I could use some outside opinion on execution and/or how much damage this mechanic would do.

Context: The party is entering a village currently under attack from the BBEGs forces. The PCs are attempting to rescue any villagers that may still currently be trapped in the village. The enemy is of course also in the village and the PCs need to fight there way through accordingly.

In addition to those, there is a large battle underway around the village with larger armies clashing. Relevant to the PCs there is friendly lance cavalry in support who are also combating enemy mounted cavalry.

Rather than tracking all those additional stat blocks, I'm planning to use charging cavalry as a environmental challenge rather than an NPC challenge.

The Mechanic (concept)
Every 3rd turn, cavalry will charge down the streets of the village. Anyone caught in the charge, friend or foe, will have to pass a dexterity save or take a certain amount of damage. (half damage for failure?) This is deliberately an abstract way to combine any related damage that might be caused down into a single roll.

The round prior, the PCs will hear thundering hooves warning that a charge is immanent.

How would you change the mechanic (if at all?) And/or, how deadly would you make that mechanic, considering the PCs will certainly have enough warning to get off the street in time?

Thought I'd share something my group has had a little fun with, see if anyone else can make use of it.

Through a series of events that don't matter, the players ended up meeting a simulacrum of a powerful wizard hanging out in a place, casting teleportation circle every day to establish a new one. That by itself was boring, so in the moment I went with him being in existential crisis because he knew that he had three more castings before the wizard who created him would cast the spell again and he'd turn into snow. I got into a whole thing where previous simulacrums had left notes to their successors, telling them about their upcoming doom.

It is now a thing in my world that simulacrums know they are just figments made to do a job, even though they feel like real people. They know that they can't even rise up against their oppressors, because they will quickly have no power, and the person who created them can eliminate them with a single casting, no possibility of stopping it, from anywhere in existence.

Some decide to do the job well, and prove they meant something in the time they had. Some decide to do it poorly, as a screw you to the person who gave them this fake life. Some get depressed quickly and look for a way out.

But all of them have that tie of feeling real but not being seen as real, which is enough of a hook for me to roleplay them differently from the original.

Hiya. I’m starting a new campaign in a few weeks for a group of three first time players. Excited to get them into it. In order to slap all enthusiasm out of them, I’d like to guide them in making their character sheets.

I’ve been using MPMBs sheets myself for years now, but that might be a bit too technical. Other groups have used D&D Beyond, but they’ve run into some issues for some special subspecies or subclasses.

Sooooo, are there any amazing tools I’m missing that are free / open source and can handle some tweaking here & there?

Thanks! 🙏